Video Games – The Next Level

Topic

What are you playing?

Replies

Maybe they are out terrorizing the neighourhood because of all the violent movies they have been watching?

2 users thanked author for this post.

Dave

[Bruce]

The last time I did any Metal Gear Solid related drunk online buying I ended up with a bootleg Solid Snake action figure with two left arms, a leg that fell off as it came out of the box, and a face that made him look like he’d had a massive stroke.

Luckily, my most recent foray into drunk Metal Gear Solid shopping was much more productive. Mondo were offering free international shipping on their orders last month so decided to take the plunge on a couple of things, including the MGS1 soundtrack. Many many happy hours wasted on this game and the music brings it all flooding back.

It’s comes on a sweet AF semi transparent smoke green double LP.

It took them over a month to actually ship the thing and then it got held up at customs where I had to pay a BS import customs charge (which wiped out the saving on the free shipping) but I don’t give a damn as it’s not as though there was a big rush to get it and I Wasn’t going to be spending the cash on anything else at the moment anyway.

If anyone is interested there’s a couple more photos of it here:

View this post on Instagram

! . The last time I drunkenly bought anything Metal Gear Solid related online I ended up waiting two months for a Solid Snake action figure with two left hands, a leg that fell off as soon as I took him out of the box, and a face that looked like he was either constipated or had an aneurysm. Luckily my second attempt at drunkenly buying something Metal Gear Solid related was much more successful. . Metal Gear Solid double LP soundtrack from @mondonews on a wicked smoke green vinyl. The packaging is great too. And the soundtrack itself is bringing back loads of old memories. . #vinylwanker #records #vinyl #vinylcollection #vinylcommunity #metalgear #metalgearsolid #mondo #mondorecords #soundtrack #videogames #videogamesoundtrack #videogame #snake #solidsnake #music #snakesnakesnaaaaaake #smokegreen #lp #keptyouwaitinghuh #metalgearrex #konami #videogame #videogames #videogaming #retrogaming #games #gamer #tacticalespionageaction

A post shared by Bruce (@judgemaths) on May 26, 2020 at 11:50am PDT

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Bruce.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Bruce.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Bruce wrote:

a BS import customs charge

I’m sad to say it but… get used to ’em.

Here is the misery I am faced with today.

It’s like this for all Blu-Rays – movies and games – although weirdly it will still play DVDs. So I guess it’s the Blu-Ray laser that’s gone out of alignment somehow.

I’ve tried a couple of quick fixes I’ve seen described online, but no luck.

In all other respects it works fine, I can still play all my digital games and use streaming services and all that, so I’m loathe to replace it outright. So I might have to look into getting someone to try and fix it locally once shops open up again.

No Maneater for me tonight though.

(I have also had the good sense to play the long game and suggest that it isn’t a priority to buy a replacement given that we’re so close to the PS5 which can play PS4 games… and my wife says that sounds very logical and has agreed that if this can’t be fixed we should maybe wait and buy one of those on release instead. Every cloud…)

2 users thanked author for this post.

Ben

[garjones]

I finished FFX yesterday. I took on the ultimate (optional) boss – Penance – and I had read there’s a cheat. One of the aeon summons has a random attack called ‘Zanmato’ that instantly kills him but that’s deemed as a bit of a cop out so I went the hard route.

So anyway this guy has regenerating arms and if both are still alive he does an instant kill move to all your party.  so you have to kill them, hit him once they are gone, and start the process again when they come back. Except he has 14 million HP and you can only really get in one or two direct shots each round. I had him sussed and wouldn’t die but after 1 hour of repeating the same attack pattern it was so fucking boring I gave up and…Zanmato!

Not a great final boss design, he’s not that hard really if you max levels but it’s just an endless grind to get there, taking 200,000 of that 14 million every 12 turns. I didn’t have the resolve to make it through the endurance test. The one in FFXII was way better and really challenged you to work different strategies and if you did was over in a few minutes.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by garjones.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

garjones wrote:

I had him sussed and wouldn’t die but after 1 hour of repeating the same attack pattern it was so fucking boring I gave up and…Zanmato!

Hey, you gave it a good try and didn’t succumb because it was too hard. You did it for the right reason – Because it was boring! Gaming, above all, should be fun, at least to me. (Not trying to get into that “what is gaming” debate.)

1 user thanked author for this post.

garjones

Yeah it was because it was too boring and I wouldn’t want to make that a reflection on the game overall, which is excellent, it’s just that last boss was a really poor design. Even absolutely maxed out there’s only two ways to beat him, the ‘cheat’ and the interminable grind of choosing ‘quick hit’ every turn for two hours.

He’s not even rated as one of the most difficult as as long as you kill the arms he won’t kill you but…so tedious.

 

1 user thanked author for this post.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at the eight minute gameplay trailer released for The Last of Us Part II.

A couple of important points first:

• Naughty Dog have carefully selected the sequence here, unless you consider knowing anything of the game a spoiler, I don’t think there is anything there to worry about.  I didn’t really catch the audio because no subs on the clip, might be something there that, if subjected to extensive analysis, might give more away but I’m sceptical.  I think they knew exactly what they were doing with this release.
• Even so, what follows draws on the new footage but only talks in very general terms about it.

Watching the new trailer did remind me of that weird tension that is in the first game, which also undermined it for me.  On the one hand, this is a realistic world, you die easily, there are OHKO enemies – but on the other there are video game restraints as to what you can and cannot grab or carry.  In a running fight with soldiers, I was really wanting Joel to grab a rifle off the corpse of a soldier but said rifle was not deemed interactive, so no go.  The problem here is: The game is giving me mixed messages I can’t reconcile and make sense of.  In the couple of clicker sequences, I might be able to use the hearing to get some idea of positioning, but how far does ‘their’ hearing extend?  Hard to tell, but in a stealth game that does matter quite a bit.  Even more so when those enemies will OHKO you if you get it wrong.

It also reminded me of the other reason I have not gone back to the first game, which is in a way, testimony to how well executed it was.  That reason being that it got in my head in a way that was quite unnerving.  Now, that is what a horror game ought to do; it is a mark of success! Even so, there’s creepy and there’s too creepy.  Even years later, via remaster, the first game is superbly atmospheric, a bit too much so? Er, yeah.  I am pretty certain Resident Evil 2 would be the same or worse – brilliant execution, but that’s just it.

Finally, which side of the realism divide do you come down on? Do you really want more realistic videogames?  Videogames and realism have always had a weird relationship.  For me I can’t say I get the whole drive for realism in terms of gameplay, it is the lack of that which I enjoy in games.  I crash a car at high speed, I’m instantly restored – I’m not dead, or in hospital, or being prosecuted for dangerous driving, or employing a defence lawyer who is arguing I was checking my eyesight.  I mess up on a FPS and get shot to pieces, I get instant reincarnation to go seek revenge.  The new sequence takes violence, something that videogames have rarely cared that much about, to new heights in terms of how it is depiction.  It is very well done, very, very smart work, but is it something I want to play and experience? I think not.  I’m wondering if Cyberpunk 2077 is going to take a similar line.  How much realism is too much? Everyone’s limit will be different.

Technically, it looks amazing – likely will be challenging the top contenders for audio-visual quality, with only PS5 games surpassing it, but maybe not for a while.

There will always be room for both.  Nintendo will never make games like The Last of Us with the same kind of marketing that Sony has, it’s just not their brand.  There will always be room for the cartoony platformers, homey resource management sims, and anime fantasy RPGs.

Apparently, some game called … I think it’s called dig-craft or something… which looks like a bunch of blocks running around outblocking other blocks blocks in some gigantic block world filled with blockpuppies and blockodiles (i dont know, I havent played it) …. is the best selling game of all time.   Realism in videogames isn’t going to subsume them all anytime soon.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Wasn’t so much thinking of it in that either-or way, but more in terms of what graphical skill and console capability allows for.  Is there a point where a game’s graphics become uncomfortably realistic?

And yes, you played Resi 7 and were fine so I’m probably talking to the wrong person about this.

Lately I’ve been playing Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, which is the next game along in the mammoth Story So Far set (seriously good value this set, even if they are ports, for a mere £18 or so). It does some interesting things with the series.

First is that it’s a prequel. This means there’s not nearly so much repetition of locations as there has been in previous games. Ok, so it sends you back to the Olympus Colleseum again, but you get to see young, pre-godhood Hercules, so that’s a novelty. And it doesn’t recycle Agrabah for once!

The other change is the cast. Sort of. It offers three playthroughs, the stories of which criss-cross and converge, where you can play as Aqua (voiced by Thea off Arrow), Terra (voiced very poorly by Logan off Veronica Mars) and Ventus, who is just Roxas from KH2 and 358/2 Days. Sort of. Maybe? I’m only in the middle of my second path, so I assume that’s going to get explained later on? I did Ventus’ path first and the final boss is a manifestation of his darkness, who looks like Sora, so I’m thinking Ventus gets reincarnated as Sora at some point, and maybe Terra as Riku and Aqua as Kairi. Maybe/. Anyway, it feels fresh, whatever’s going on, even despite running into some familiar faces.

The biggest thing it does though is change up the combat system. It’s still real time, like the main KHs, but your attacks are based on a deck of commands that you build. This includes items, which are one time use, but the proper attacks (beyond a simple hit with the keyblade) are persistent and have timed reloads, like in an MMO. You’re limited to a select number of commands in your deck, which can be quite challenging early on, but by using them, they level up (which I think makes them a bit more powerful?). The main benefit of this is that you can then blend them with other attacks to create more powerful ones. So blend two max-levelled Fires and you get Fira. Blend Fira with Strike Raid and you get Fire Strike. It’s a clever system and it gives you a lot more flexibility and focus in what your attacks are than the system from KH2. It’s so much easier to pull off high powered attacks, once you’ve unlocked them. The ability system is tied into this as well, with melded commands coming with abilities attached and once you max level the command, the ability is permanently available even if you get rid of the command it came with.

The slightly infuriating “styles” system (or whatever it was called) from KH2 is bettered as well, with “D-Links”. After you meet certain characters in the story you get a D-Link with them, which are powered by an extra gauge. When you activate one, your command desk is temporarily replaced with a special deck of commands themed to that character. It really adds a lot of versatility and is especially helpful early on, when you’ve got not much to work with normally. Plus, it ties nicely into the game’s themes of friendship/hearts and whatnot and makes up for the lack of companion characters.

On top of all that, there’s a surprisingly good Monopoly style game thrown in too, which can help you gain and level up commands. Considering this was a side-game on a handheld, it’s impressive how much it improves on the previous main entry in the series. Jason Dohring’s wooden performance aside, it’s got a good cast too, including Mark Hamill and Leonard Nimoy. It’s impressive that Squeenix and Disney keep getting high calibre actors like them and Christopher Lee in KH2 given the complete nonsense the scripts must read like.

Dave wrote:

Here is the misery I am faced with today.

It’s like this for all Blu-Rays – movies and games – although weirdly it will still play DVDs. So I guess it’s the Blu-Ray laser that’s gone out of alignment somehow. I’ve tried a couple of quick fixes I’ve seen described online, but no luck. In all other respects it works fine, I can still play all my digital games and use streaming services and all that, so I’m loathe to replace it outright. So I might have to look into getting someone to try and fix it locally once shops open up again.

Looking into this further it seems like this coincided with the recent 7.51 PS4 firmware update, which makes sense – there was no gradual degradation of the laser, it just stopped working immediately after the update installed.

Which I’m obviously a bit peeved about if Sony have broken my PS4.

With the PS5 is soon to be released? Uncanny.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Todd

Ben wrote:

Wasn’t so much thinking of it in that either-or way, but more in terms of what graphical skill and console capability allows for.  Is there a point where a game’s graphics become uncomfortably realistic?

And yes, you played Resi 7 and were fine so I’m probably talking to the wrong person about this.

You probably are! I love total immersion!

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

I can overlook some things on games if they’re fun but a game that out right lies from the start, describes its lowest difficulty setting as being easy and then goes on to deliver a game that is nothing of the kind, with some of the hardest bosses I’ve encountered, nope.  And that is the entirety of the Kingdom Hearts series.  Sure, there’s Kingdom Hearts III, but everything right now says that’ll do the same as the other games – either kills itself at the start or kills itself with the final boss.  Some of this I would be less inclined to object to if I was playing on Normal, but I’m not – the setting describes itself as easy, but it is far from it.

Does the difficulty contribute anything positive to the games? No.  It has almost destroyed every single one for me, and the sole exception was very close to being so for the same reason.  The series just doesn’t know what it wants to be – is it light, breezy, entertaining series crossing together Final Fantasy and Disney in charming combinations or is it a grueling set of bastard hard boss fights?  You’ll have some sections, quite a few where it is the former and then you will get a boss you could not possibly anticipate of prepare for.  Even guides fail to convey just how messed up the difficulty spikes are here.  Grinding and leveling? Of minimal help where the combat “system” is a broken lock-on – you need the lock-on because of how fast enemies move and the damage they do, but it rarely ever lives up to its name, with bosses especially casually breaking it whenever they want to.  Often guides will say stuff like block and counter, but you have to see the attack coming and every boss and enemy loves off-camera, blindspot attacks or, even better, teleports to  break your lock-on, then does a teleport attack, yeah, good luck blocking that – oh and the block’s weak too.  Magic? Items? All done by a clunky-as-hell menu that doesn’t freeze the on-screen action, by the time you select what you want, chances are you’ll be down another 50% of your life.

What really grates is the cynical bringing in of Disney characters.  Hey, it’s Mickey Mouse, you get to play a level with him? Yes, you do but you’ll pay for it in pain, lots of pain.  What’s sad is that there are few companies that tell stories in the way Square Enix do.  The scenes always have a lot of style and it tells its convoluted tale with conviction, but it doesn’t mean much if it gates itself behind boss battles that aren’t fun.  Part of the games want you to enjoy the flying, floating wuxia-style combat, but to really enjoy it? It needs to be easier because I can’t enjoy the artistry of it because I’m having to keep an eye on the life bar, then navigate a crappy menu, while the screen has lots of graphical clutter and camera mainlining a permanent LSD overdose – an example of this done right? The bulk of Nier Automata – there’s sections there that are exactly the same but the assist options are such that I can actually relax and appreciate the other aspects of the game.

Why does this even matter? Because when you are in that flow, watching your character deck the hell out of a load of adversaries in very stylish fashion, it looks and feels amazing.  And it doesn’t need anything else.  It doesn’t need the difficulty, it doesn’t need any sense of challenge, if you want that, there’s no shortage, and yet, it keeps thinking it must also compete with those kind of games.  The one game I did complete – Birth By Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage – frequently looked amazing, but nearly wrecked itself with a pointlessly difficult boss battle in the form of Phantom Aqua.  It also had a couple of very opaque puzzles that made no sense whatsoever.  But outside of that, with just the usual battles and the world design? It looked amazing.  Some of the audio-visual combinations for those mostly easy fights were a joy to see and hear, then along comes a boss battle, yay, great.  It didn’t need it, it didn’t need any of them.

Kingdom Hearts I went back to, as there was a load of stat boosters I hadn’t used. I put those to work and, for a time, they did the job.  But then, at the final boss, the game just whacks up the difficulty because….. Because.  Birth by Sleep did exactly the same, but it didn’t even wait until the end.  Kingdom Hearts II? Decided to gate its entire story behind a bastard hard minigame. Dream Drop Distance? Did the best of all of them, but it still went and amped up the final bosses, in a way that was unrepresentative of the sections that preceded them.  It had some good other pieces oto – the Drop sequences were mostly fun despite poor depth perception, but the missions detracted from the fun and the boss fights in those sections were awful, a late game one being a particularly bad offender; playing the no-longer-a-bastard Riku worked well .  Thus, I doubt the last game will change this pattern, might see 90% then I’ll likely finish the story via YouTube.

At the time I pre-ordered and bought it, the name Tetsuya Nomura didn’t have that much significance for me.  Now? I’m considering selling Final Fantasy 7 Remake due to these experiences.  It doesn’t matter that I beat the Scorpion boss, it doesn’t matter that I just about managed it on Normal too, because there will obviously be far harder bosses later that I’ll find impossible to do, unless setting it on Classic renders your characters immortal.  If it does, I might be in with a shot. Though, FF7R does do slow time for menu selection which would have made all of these games far better.

If a game designer doesn’t want to make their games easy that’s fine, but don’t put in a setting called Easy and then render it entirely contrary to what you called it.  Better yet, don’t use Disney characters for it too.  The game sales will go down? At least the game will have a sense of honesty and integrity.

Oh well, suppose I better go get my arse killed by Kingdom Hearts III, might as well finish the set.

1 user thanked author for this post.

You may find KH3 a better ride.

I did not find it tough and generally wished it was more challenging (except for the toy story level which did have some hard parts).  This is helped a lot by it being a bit more open world with its travel system so you can be predisposed to grind while looking for secrets if you don’t feel ready to take on a particular world.

I’ve only played the original Kingdom Hearts on release, and do recall it to be quite challenging in parts,  particularly given the childish sensibility.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Anonymous wrote:

You may find KH3 a better ride.

I really hope so.  Was feeling utterly despondent earlier.

Thing is, the visuals for BbS:AFP were glorious, it looked incredible and when in combat, the level of detail in it all – it would have taken ages to create.

FF7R is distinctly different from KH, right?

In terms of combat?

They are different systems.

You do have to move and think in real time but the game pauses when selecting actions.  It takes a whole to learn it and understand what stagger is ans when to use it. It’s definitely deeper then kingdom hearts.

Being absolutely honest, I think you will find some boss fights and enemies tough – particularly if you expect to be able to brute force them.  I played on both Normal and Hard and found no encounter insurmountable but you may consider Easy the better option for you.

One of the problems I have with Easy is I suspect it doesn’t really introduce you to the mechanics proper – which team mate is good for what and how to use them – and let’s you steamroll any character with any enemy.  I foresee that being an issue in the final chapters when the game will expect you to show everything you’ve learned.

I also think you won’t plan ahead in terms of levelling up your materia as you won’t recognise the benefit until that time where you realise you could do with a +50% health materia and now have to spend hours tediously levelling it from scratch.

I would suggest playing as far through on Normal as you can and really giving it a go. You can drop down to easy at any time and your progress/materia is not affected.

You also have Easy Automatic where the game virtually plays itself if you get to a point where you just want to see the story.

One thing to be aware of: the first real skill check is Hell House in Chapter 9. It’s meant to be a crash course in learning Aeriths magic potential but it’s quite tough notwithstanding, and that is generally agreed in all the guides I’ve read.  You might want to consider replaying a few chapters at that point to grind levels/materia.

To be fair to it, the demo for FF7R did give a good intro to the combat, stagger and character switching especially.

For all it got close when I took Scorpy on in Normal, no one died.  Which might be a nogger win than I think.  The difficulty difference lay in that that defence field went up more often and the battle was faster.  But freezing time for menu choices helped massively.

The one irritating aspect was you get the stagger level to 90%, or even stagger it completely, and then the fucker jumps onto the wall.

There are a lot of bosses that jump to walls, or change mobility like that.  I suppose that’s part of the game – trying to build the stagger with everything else that’s going on.

I think you will find a lot of the bosses challenging, but every single one of them has a “trick” or a set of materia, or character you should favour which makes them a lot easier.

Because I played it before release, I didn’t have the benefit of guides, and when I did my hard mode run I found some bosses easier because all of a sudden I was taught what their weakness was (by looking at a guide).  That doesn’t apply to every boss encounter, but it did for some.

Scorpion, for example, I didn’t realise you were meant to attack him from the rear until I did my hard mode run.

Ben wrote:

The one game I did complete – Birth By Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage – frequently looked amazing, but nearly wrecked itself with a pointlessly difficult boss battle in the form of Phantom Aqua. It also had a couple of very opaque puzzles that made no sense whatsoever.

I’m guessing those are in Aqua’s path? I just finished Terra’s tonight and while there was definitely one boss fight that was a clear spike in difficulty (Zack in Olympus Colliseum) I don’t remember any puzzles, frankly, obtuse or otherwise.

I was totally wrong about Ventus, Terra and Aqua getting reincarnated as Sora, Riku and Kairi, as Terra not only runs into Sora and Riku as six year olds or so, but ends up getting possessed by Xehanort, possibly being his form in KH1 (not quite sure how it lines up with Xehanort working under Ansem). Seemed totally obvious once I happened, can’t believe I didn’t see it.. I had a little trouble with the final battle, but I reloaded and changed my command load-out, making a point to include an ability which powers up Focus when taking damage, which helped a lot.

Looking forward to Aqua’s path next.

[Ben]

Martin Smith wrote:

I’m guessing those are in Aqua’s path? I just finished Terra’s tonight and while there was definitely one boss fight that was a clear spike in difficulty (Zack in Olympus Colliseum) I don’t remember any puzzles, frankly, obtuse or otherwise.

No, this is, despite the title, an entirely separate game that is part of Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Final Prologue.  Maybe the puzzles in it will make more sense to you, they didn’t to me.

As to the one you are on, with Terra’s I hit the wall out of nowhere that is the Eraqus fight and decided the game could go fuck itself.

If you’re giving out tips, is there any easy way to deal with the Struggle rubbish at the start of KH2?  Every time it’s the same bullshit, get hit, lose 30 orbs in one go and I never catch up.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Ben.

No, this is, despite the title, an entirely separate game that is part of Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Final Prologue.  Maybe the puzzles in it will make more sense to you, they didn’t to me.

Ah, right! That’ll be the nonsensical naming conventions of KH striking again.

Ben wrote:

As to the one you are on, with Terra’s I hit the wall out of nowhere that is the Eraqus fight and decided the game could go fuck itself.

Oh, I didn’t have much problem with that battle. I just focused on using the shotlock to break the rhythm of his surge attacks and made sure I had two healing spells in my deck.

If you’re giving out tips, is there any easy way to deal with the Struggle rubbish at the start of KH2? Every time it’s the same bullshit, get hit, lose 30 orbs in one go and I never catch up.

Erm… I don’t remember much about the Struggle stuff, to be honest (other than that I couldnt’ seem to get the game to let me do the optional later stuff with it). Maybe concentrate on blocking (or parrying at least) and then attacking rather than pressing your own attack?

Oh, well, I’m screwed then, but thanks.  Reasons are:

• I find the shotlock idea hugely fiddly to pull off, having similar issues with airstepping in KH3.
• Guard I’ve never been able to get to work because you have to be so precise.  Other games you hit block and your character blocks, here they just do this swing and that’s it, if you can’t get the timing – and I really can’t – stuffed art thou.
• And I can’t shuffle the deck at the speed and accuracy the game demands, even on the easiest setting.

Maybe this will brighten your day Ben but I’ve been stuck on stupid Bathin in Bloodstained for about a week.  I am finding that game hard and you seemed to find it to be a breeze.  Any suggestions are appreciated.

[Ben]

Playing on easy helped.

Stocking up on food is a major help, food heals far better than potions.

Gale crawler is a good spell to power up. As is Teps Oceus if you have it, only found the benefits of that far later.

Level equality or superiority can help.

Use a fast, good reach weapon – think I was still using that scythe-sword at this point.

Don’t be afraid to hit and run as you probably did with Zangetsu, but to avoid the lasers position yourself well and don’t move at all.

But, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is major differences in how the game plays between the difficulty settings.  Think in normal the bosses are a lot stronger so this post might not help you much.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Ben.

1 user thanked author for this post.

I was using one of the heavy swords but I switched it out for the ice one (I forget it’s name).  I haven’t really experimented with the other weapons – whips, firearms etc.

How do I sort out the  food? I know the dude in the village can cook it but I never have any ingredients to make anything other then “Heavy Cream”?

You can buy some ingredients, but others are specific enemy random drops.  But, after crafting once, the item becomes available to buy.  Pizza is well worth the work to crack.

Also, look at the passive shards you have, upgrade as much as you can.

Think elemental weaknesses matter far more on normal, with the idea being you equip to match.

Heavy swords are OK, but they’re also slow and range limited, which isn’t going to work well on a boss like Bathin.

Ben wrote:

Oh, well, I’m screwed then, but thanks.  Reasons are:

• I find the shotlock idea hugely fiddly to pull off, having similar issues with airstepping in KH3.
• Guard I’ve never been able to get to work because you have to be so precise.  Other games you hit block and your character blocks, here they just do this swing and that’s it, if you can’t get the timing – and I really can’t – stuffed art thou.
• And I can’t shuffle the deck at the speed and accuracy the game demands, even on the easiest setting.

Yeah, I’ve never found blocking particularly effective in KH games. From what I recall of Struggle, parrying might be your best bet, which is just hitting attack when they’re attacking.

So, let’s talk about Kingdom Hearts III, which is doing better than expected and – unless it later does something very stupid – might actually be good.

Should you play this or the preceding entries first?  And this is where it gets weird because neither route is really that satisfactory.

If you start here, there are these Story So Far sections that I found to be both incomplete and manipulative.  They may as well as just put a notice saying ‘go play the other games’, because none of them really work as a recap.

Yet, if you have played the preceding entries – and even completed them – it’s weird because some game pieces transfer over while others, that you might expect, do not.  For instance Dream Drop Distance had a map you could actually look at and indicated enemies in bright pink dots, it was very clear and very effective – gone.  The Flowmotion stuff in that game worked far better than the one here.  Also, odd as it sounds, Birth by Sleep: Fragmentary Passage has just those little bit better graphics which I didn’t expect – both look lovely, but BbS:FP has the edge.

Still, with those oddities out of the way, how does it work? At times its still odd, in that it doesn’t seem to have learnt as much as I would have liked.  The camera is better, most of the time it draws out further which really helps your view of the chaos, but not always – that inconsistency mars it a bit, but in this one they clearly wanted the player to have more fun.  They’ve abandoned the card deck menu for a more traditional FF-style one, but with the KH-restrictions and limitations – which I wish they didn’t.  The other thing is they really nerfed healing magic, one use drains your entire MP gauge and it takes a good while to recharge.

Despite that, surprisingly, with the sheer amount of stuff going on on screen at any one time, it is far easier to tell what you’re doing.  In earlier games it was all too easy to be whacked due to being lost in the action.  There were a couple of moments early where I thought they might have misjudged it, like the demon tower fight with Riku and Mickey.  Nor can it seem to make its mind up on how to handle bigger enemies, those fights tend to be weird.  The one thing I haven’t worked out yet is how to choose when you have multiple special attacks available.

The only total failure so far was building a boss fight around the airstepping idea – that didn’t work for me at all.  Had thought the game was stuffed in Twilight Town when it brought out a boss with at least 10 life bars, but it legged after a handful were taken out.  The one consistent weakness so far is the boss health bars, more health is expected of a boss but it doesn’t make them that much better either.  It still has the vague signposting of earlier games too, which I was hoping had gone.

Overall though, so far, they seem to have worked out a much better balance of story to gameplay, with the one not having to carry the other anywhere near as much compared to previous entries.  Done Olympus, Twilight Town and Toy Box.

 

As a bit of a last resort to try and fix my PS4 firmware error and let me read discs again, I’m initialising the PS4 – wiping the whole thing and starting over.

I’m shitting it slightly as I’m afraid of making the problem worse, but Sony’s help center won’t do anything about it unless I exhaust all the options, so I have to.

Apparently it takes a few hours so we’ll see how it goes. All our game data is backed up so at least that’s definitely recoverable even if this PS4 ends up beyond help.

Good luck!

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Dave wrote:

All our game data is backed up so at least that’s definitely recoverable even if this PS4 ends up beyond help.

Including your save data? Since you have PS+ you can cloud backup it.

Might be a tip too late….

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Thanks. Yeah I used both the cloud backup and USB to be on the safe side. Hasn’t fixed the disc issue but I haven’t lost any data.

As a last resort I’m going to buy one of those lens cleaner discs to see if that helps.

Sony are being pretty unhelpful, with their only proposed solution being to pay over £100 to send it away and have it fixed or refurbished. Which seems like a bit of a pisstake if it’s their update that’s caused this.

To be honest, if that’s my only option at the end of all this then I’ll probably cut my losses and wait for the PS5.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Have a look at Youtube, I went down a rabbit hole there the other day and a guy was buying a dozen broken consoles at a time off eBay and fixing a lot of them pretty easily. Most of them were disc issues.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Yeah I’ve had a look at a few fixes and I’ve tried the ones I feel comfortable with but to no avail.

I’m not prepared to open it up and tinker with the insides because I’m just not knowledgeable or experienced enough to perform those kind of fixes (I’ve opened up a few controllers and made some fixes in the past,  but I’ve never meddled with the insides of a console).

We’ll see if the lens cleaner disc helps. Failing that I could ask one of the local repair shops to look at it once they open up again. But if it is a firmware update issue (and the timing just seems so coincidental) then I’m not sure what they’d be able to do about it.

Part of the issue is that I’m loathe to put the whole console out of action just to fix the disc drive, as it’s one of the main ways the kids socialise at the moment (via Minecraft) and we have that digitally (along with several other games) so can play those fine.

It’s just the stack of disc-based games that we can’t play any more. Including Maneater and Doom Eternal!

I’ll have to make do with SoR4 and Doom64 for now. Oh, and I also got Titanfall 2 digitally recently too, so I need to check that out. And there’s a CoD game and Star Wars Battlefront 2 free on PS Plus this month.

So I’m not going to run out of stuff to play!

2 users thanked author for this post.

Bruce, Ben

Noticed a day or so back the PS4 was saying ‘update system to 7.51’ – hmm, wasn’t that the one that bricked Dave’s Ps4? Don’t really have a choice on this, let’s hope it doesn’t explode.

Finally did a disc test today with Steep.  It works, phew.

In other news….

Streets of Rage 2

Booted up the Wii U after months – more likely year plus – of not using, booted up the Wii’s virtual console and had a blast playing this.  Does it still hold up 28 years later? Oh yes.

Went through it on easy with Axel, with one of the particular delights being throwing around the fat bastards – you can’t do that in the first and third games.  The influence of Street Fighter II is all over this.  This is what it would look like if SF2 were a scrolling beat ’em up and not one-on-one.

Also just did level one again but with Blaze.  Playing her is so much fun, then you get a knife and the moves with that, with Blaze, is crazy – 3-hit knife combo.  On top of that you can just go around back dropping everyone into the ground.  Or you just shove them down into it.

The curve is perfect, for the first half of the game you get introduced to most of the enemy types, then for the second half you start getting previous end-of-level bosses for mid-level bosses, with the last level having a version of all of them.  The hardest remains the fat boxer – that guy was always a bastard to beat up.  Although, of all the boss fights, Shiva is where it becomes the most tactical.

But it all still holds up, even when played on a 4k HDR TV. Visuals, gameplay and that soundtrack.

So, very important question about Streets of Rage 4 – can movement be done by the d-pad?  I just don’t link this series to playing with analogue sticks.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Yes, you can use the D-pad.

I think you can also throw the fat bastards around.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Thanks.

Throwing them around is so much fun, in the other two the game deemed them too heavy.  Watching Blaze throw a guy at twice her weight 20 foot never gets old.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

I’ve found myself using tactical throws a lot in SoR4, maybe more than I did even in the second game. Throwing a half-dead punk their way is a great method of keeping large groups of baddies in check.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

That soumds like my Tuesday meeting.

Epic Game Store is giving away Overcooked for free this week!

So, Kingdom Hearts III: Part 2….

Tangled was pretty good save for one bit – the awful, mandatory dancing rhythm game.  The one thing that the game really needs with the larger worlds is a direction arrow.

Monstropolis was the first level where I didn’t like most of it – too much indestructible hazards, unclear indications or outright lying ones.  The boss was pointlessly difficult.  I saw no reason for it having the high defence it did.  One thing that was true for all the big boss fights is the game would have been far better cutting out the bullcrap.  Midway through, each would do this weird move where you’d have to do something else to bring them back into play but it just doesn’t work for me.  The other common factor is you need the lock-on to keep track of the boss but the boss will invariably break the lock and then you get hit by off-camera attacks.

Frozen was quite a bit better.  Granted the whole labyrinth of ice section fell apart for me on a conceptual level because the gang have fire spells, just burn your way out! There were some quite tricky sections in too, which feels quite cynical to me because a lot of kids will want to play this level, but it’s definitely one of the harder ones.

Pirates was a real mix of the good and awful.  The awful involved swimming and underwater combat, no surprise there plus ship racing, but with waterspouts and enemy ship teleporting in the whole time.  Those sections were crap, as was the ‘get 300 crabs’ bit.  But after this, the level lets you explore and power up te Leviathan and that is a whole lot of fun.  The only flaw there is it will sometimes teleport three big super-ships that can teleport at will which nerfs the bulk of your special moves, as you’ll start whacking it and it just warps away.  The one other flaw of this level is none of the reproductions of the characters really looks right.  It’s why the animation based levels are that bit more effective.

Big Hero 6 – how you waste a level like this is beyond me, but waste it they did.  From the awful VR ‘training’ bit to the ‘you must save these team members before they die’ with the requirements to do so being a mess – why does a flowmotion hit work when whacking it doesn’t? Because the game says so.  To a boss that you can never really see and easily dodge, to a final on-rails boss fight. It wasn’t good.

The dark world fights, both with the shadow horde and shadow aqua, were pretty awful too.  They were only carried through via the story, as was the Land of Departure section.  Talking of, playing Aqua in Birth by Sleep: A Fragmentary Passage really helps on this section and its boss fight.

The one big objection I have is they really nerfed the cure magic, it takes too long to recharge and on some of the bosses it’s needed a damn sight more than they think.  The big missed opportunity is the synthesis system which feels like its always operating while shackled.  They want it to be a Final Fantasy crossover but most of the time FF takes off the limits in a way that isn’t so here.

The big problem is KH3 can’t decide if it just wants to be a supremely entertaining and charming experience or if it wants to be a rather irritating, artificially difficult video game.  For me it works spectacularly well when it embraces being the former and forgets about the latter.  A bit smarter AI on the targeting and the game would be better.  A smaller issue is they forgot no one liked the fight on edge of cliff and fall off sections of earlier games – those are here and it still irks.  Wall run battles are another misfire because they don’t really combine the two well, you’ll fight an enemy on the wall then fall off, a Bayonetta-style wall walk would have been better for these sections.

Graphics and soundtrack are always excellent, the game has a lot of charm and that’s what keeps you playing, despite the flaws.

Finally, I never expected to type this but the Gummi ship levels really work once you’ve powered the ship up.  Just flying around is a lot of fun.  True, most of the boss fights are pretty monotonous but that’s only one flaw compared to the host of problems these levels had before.

I finished Birth by Sleep today, unlocking the final chapter. It’s not very long, just an extra fight against Xehanort in Terra’s body. I had a few problems with it initially and resorted to looking at a guide from IGN, which suggested blocking a lot. That might seem obvious, but as I said to Ben the other day, blocking in the KH games isn’t that useful a lot of the time, as it’s hard to time properly and I’ve found it better to just go with a strong offence. But it seemed a decent bit of advice and after I got the hang of the timing mostly – along with a lot of healing – I managed to get through the fight and its second stage.

Afterwards, I scrolled through the rest of the guide which said, in no uncertain terms, that there was no point in using shotlock commands in the battle, as they wouldn’t do you any good. Instead, focus on using keyblade attacks like Time Splicer. Which was interesting, because I all but gave up on attacks like Time Splicer, which just got blocked and led to me taking a lot of damage, and mainly attacked with a shotlock command.

I say I finished it, there’s actually a secret chapter I didn’t bother with. On the difficulty level I went with (standard) you have to get all the collectibles to unlock it and frankly I can’t be arsed.

Anyway, good game overall. I quite liked Aqua, who is pretty much the main protagonist (she gets the final section for most of the locations the trio individually visit) and it was surprisingly effective as a prequel. Sure, it spends a lot of time reduxing the plot to Disney films that had characters featured in earlier games (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty), but that’s kind of the MO of the series really. More importantly though, it’s attempts to flesh out the backstory for the KH-original worlds and characters actually works and feels worth telling. It’s not just tacking unnecessary origins onto everyone or explaining how one guy got a tattoo, it’s actually world building and expanding out the scope of the wider story, which is cool.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Ben wrote:

But it all still holds up, even when played on a 4k HDR TV. Visuals, gameplay and that soundtrack.

That’s true for a lot of old-school sprite games… of course, not everyone is equal, but those that were beautiful then are just as beautiful now… which is NOT the case for all those 1st gen 3D games that came out not long after the death of the sprite games…

Anyways, in other SOR news, seems they’re doing a patch soon enough to rebalance the gameplay… I can’t wait… the game’s been too frustrating for me to play, so I hope whatever changes they make will improve it somehow… I mean due to the nature of the product they can’t do miracles with it, but I’ll take anyhting that makes it less infuriatingly frustrating.

Martin Smith wrote:

I quite liked Aqua,

You’ll love her in A Fragmentary Passage

1 user thanked author for this post.

Martin Smith

All I want to know is what the hell’s a Gummi ship, Ben?

Just so you know, if your ship doesn’t have a co-pilot you’ve named Chewie, I for one will be very disappointed.

Behold, ye Gummi ship:

No co-pilots allowed,

1 user thanked author for this post.

Boooo stoopid Gummi ship!

Gummi Chewie has you on your six.

I finished the original Doom 64 and the new Lost Levels extra levels – definitely a slice of classic 90s Doom.

Some of the button puzzling is a bit tougher than the original Doom with lots of backtracking and revealing new paths and areas. It seems to throw more of the big enemies at you with you frequently facing off against several Hell Knights Barons of Hell, and Arachnotrons ever level.

One minor niggle is I’m not a huge fan of some of the sprite redesigns (the Pain Elements particularly look stupid). Alos the final boss in the main game is brick hard, verging on impossible unless you pick up three hidden keys earlier in the game (which then makes is ridiculously easy to beat).

Certain I’ll revisit revisit this with the same frequency I do Doom 1 and 2. Looking at the achievements list there are things called “fun” levels I need to find so I may spend a bit of time searching for those before moving on to something new.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Hi

I am ready to talk about Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire on PS4.

Should you buy this game? No.

What! What if I really love old-school CRPGs like Baldurs gate and super complex pen and paper D&D RPGs that are as much maths homework as they actually playing a role playing game? Well, a very tentative maybe, but only if you forked out for a separate solid state drive for your PS4 (like I did) otherwise the loading times are hell (like unplayable hell – 2 minute loading time hell).

This is definitely the worst ported game to a PS4 I have ever played.  It took me the first 10 hours to come to grips with the interface (which sucks).  The next, however long, to learn, sort of, the basics of the Real Time With Pause combat. And probably the last 10 hours to actually enjoy the complexities of what the game had to show.

Unfortunately, what that meant was for A LOT of the game I was just using the party AI and overleveling the key encounters and just watching my party wipe the floor with the bosses. This isn’t how the game is meant to play and it really did feel like going from screen to screen (made even more frustrating because there are bugs – oh yes, OH YES, there are BUGS it is a BUGGY piece of shit).  It literally talk me to the max level cap (20) and playing through the DLCs (which come free with the PS4 version) that I finally appreciated the mechanics of using the spells, potions, food etc.

That is a badly made game that takes you that long to use it’s core mechanics. BUT I know understand that this game is not made for me.  It is made for people that play Dungeons and Dragons and CRPGS and already know all that stuff innately.  Which, probably would be fine, and I may have even been inclined to venture into those mechanics earlier if the interface on the PS4 didn’t suck so much.

The bugs.  So I need to talk about the bugs.  I came across no game-breaking bugs throughout my playthrough but I had to quit and reload A LOT.  Like at least 2 every time played.  And there are other annoying things like “clicking” on things and then your party just goes and interacts with something else.  It’s … it’s broken, and should never have been released on the PS4 in this state.  The percentage of completion on the trophies is a good indicator of how many people have bought this and seen it through (it’s low).

So did I enjoy it? Yes, I did.  I’m also glad I supported Obsidian who clearly do not have the budget to make the scale of games that they clearly could.  I enjoyed the DLC the most (because i was forced to come to grips with how the game was meant to be played). BUT this is absolutely not comparable to the so, so, so much better Divinity: Original Sin II.  They are similar, excepting Divinity is turn based.  Divinity is just better, funner, funnier, the combat far more interesting and strategy-invoking, prettier (3d engine vs POEs isometric), more accessible in terms of lore … it’s just better.

If you’re interested in a traditional sword and sorcery RPG get Divinity: Original Sin 2.  I can’t recommend playing POE2 on the Ps4, especially if you don’t have an external solid state drive (although, I don’t regret the 20 bucks I spent or the time playing it).

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Ouch.

The tech issues you endured are unique to this second game Tim? You didn’t encounter anything like them with the first game?

I dont know.

The company that ported the sequel to the PS4 is After Evil, which i think is the same company for the first game.

Id bet the same shitty interface is used in the first game (the game was designed for a keyboard and mouse and no imagination or testing seems to have been used in porting the game to the PS4 controls).

Id also bet the constant loading times are there to, as its the same engine.

In short: I have no idea, but im not in any hurry to find out.

Ben, youve got a bit of a backlog and Divinity Original Sin 2 shoukd be way, way ahead of this on your list. You dont even need to play Original Sin 1 to get that game as uts virtually enrirely separate. Conversely, the story of POE 2 is basically inaccessible at times, unless you played the first one.

Well, I will have to be starting something else.

I finally finished a Kingdom Hearts game in the form of Kingdom Hearts III.

I don’t think I’ve ever played such a profoundly unsatisfying endgame.

It started off quite well. The battle with the heartless horde was superb, the very idea of a Mountain Coaster bombardment wonderfully executed.  The subsequent sections with the battles with the Lich worked better than expected and the final demon tower battle was OK.  True, it had a useless ‘render the boss invincible, you can do nothing but avoid’ section that added nothing but the real aggro followed that. They clearly wanted a big, epic sequence, but one where you are first pounding triangle, then again, but this time whole dodging missiles that, with the amount of firepower you’re throwing out, you should be destroying anyway, just wasn’t it.  There was also way too much graphical clutter.

What followed this was the fights with Organisation XIII, each of which was preceded by a goddamn awful timed run sequence – two of them I failed on completely, the other two I just pulled off – all were excellent examples of horrible game design.  And then there are the fights.  The idea of a boss fight is you start it, as it goes on you work how the boss works – wrong, in every single one of these it never failed to disrupt things completely with a cutscene.  You might have just got into the rhythm and…. cutscene.  You were doing a ton of damage to the boss? Cutscene.  Each and every single one of them.  And on every exit cutscene, my view of those walking pieces of cardboard can be boiled down: Shut up and fucking die.

To my surprise, I got through the five fights – I can’t say any of them count as enjoyable encounters.  Challenge? Depends on what you count as one.  I’m not a fan of enemies forever attacking off-camera, with a useless block and chaos everywhere.  Similarly, they liked giving each boss an invincible phase that was hugely irritating.  These were supposed to be epic endgame adversaries, each a hugely satisfying encounter – they simply were not.  The final one with the three Xehanorts only amplified all the awful aspects of their predecessors – the one thing it had going for it was it didn’t have the timed run crap.

I hadn’t actually intended to try nor expected to finish it.  But the final world turns out to be an instant boss fight – probably one of the worst I’ve ever played.  Turns out the first is one enemy but with multiple copies, not that there’s an easy way to tell that, it’s all very confusing.  As is the fight with enemies teleporting all over the place.  Then there is Armoured Xenohart, whose attacks you are told to block but you will never see him coming, the graphical clutter is all over the place – strangely the swimming section wasn’t as awful as the rest.  By some miracle of whacking and spamming Curaga, I just about won and got to the final boss.  This was the same rubbish as before but on steroids, with a rage mode that made no sense and a final section where, despite there being no prompts, you are supposed to just press triangle.

It was shite.

And the ending? Incomplete, inconclusive, confusing – fuck this series.

It could be brilliant if it simply did a few things.  Dropping the amount of utter bullshit all the bosses engaged in would help.  Rendering easy mode as an easy mode, including the boss fights in that.  Embrace the idea that being entertaining does not make it lesser as a game.  When I was able to play fights that were easy, where I didn’t have to worry about surviving, I could actually appreciate everything that was going on around mew.  I could appreciate the artistry of the moves, of the details of the execution, of the wondrous graphics.  In the boss fights I’m trying to watch a boss the camera can’t keep up with and a health bar that goes down too damn fast and a magic bar that recovers too slowly.

I remain seriously ambivalent about even starting Final Fantasy VII Remake, as who knows what kind of crap is lurking behind it’s “easy” setting?  The bigger concern is perhaps in story.  The Kingdom Hearts series is a mess, the third game tries to bring it all together but then, with the ending, decides it just can’t be arsed.  Is that going to happen to FF VII? I can’t rule it out.

Ultimately, this series has so much going for it for it to work as pure entertainment.  The Disney link alone will do that, but the series just resists being so, even this latest game.  But hey, I finally finished one of the bastards.

I hope you like FF7 remake. I loved it.  Easily one of the best games I’ve played in ages.

Conversely I did not like Kingdom Hearts 3.  I thought it was kind of boring.  I remember enjoying the 1st one but any charm the 3rd has was evidently wasted on me.  Also, the story is virtually inaccessible for me, as I’ve only played the original.

Edit: Also, I agree with you about the endgame. I remember thinking it sucked too and being annoyed at the pacing.  I think the Re: Mind DLC was released as a sort of remix of the endgame, so clearly squeenix was aware that the game was a bit hollow at that point.

To be honest Tim, the story is inaccessible regardless of how many of the series you have or haven’t played.

Yeah, I think the story is kinda dumb.  It’s not the Disney stuff either, it’s the Xenahort and heartless, and bodyless and soulless and reverse mirrors and digital copies and probably time travel and stuff.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake is a really lovely story that’s told really well.  It does do a big  swerve at the end (which I’m sure you are aware of) but it didn’t take me out of the story like Kingdom Hearts did.  It made me excited for future instalments.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Decided to go for something quite different with Pillars of Eternity.

Very early days, some of its systems are pretty vague and it doesn’t seem to want to explain much.  Haven’t worked out the combat much, but on easy, so far, I haven’t really needed to either.

Playing it is quite an interesting experience in that you can watch YouTube vids of it, but those don’t give you the accurate sense of what it’s like to play this.  There’s some quite subtle lighting effects that renders the world in a very atmospheric fashion, going through an old ruin felt remarkably creepy in spite of the top down isometric view.

Nor, on the face of it would you see any real connection between this and The Outer Worlds, except both are by Obsidian.   And what both of those games have in common is an interest in just about everything other than combat.  Sure, it’s there but it’s there to do the job, it isn’t the main attraction.  No, that is the writing and the characters and the conversation options.  It’s here you can see Pillars of Eternity‘s common heritage with The Outer Worlds as there’s some very sharp writing here that’s a lot of fun to experience.  Often it is rendered as text on screen, that’s all, yet it manages to hook your attention and draw you in.  You then have decisions to make within the conversation that feel quite involved, more than you might expect.

Not sure how this one’ll go, but I have my first new party member.

Is Eder your first party member?

How are loading screens and interface?

Looking into it, it looks like Paradox Arctic ported the first game and versus Evil ported the second, so they probably play entirely differently.

[Ben]

Anonymous wrote:

Is Eder your first party member?

How are loading screens and interface?

Nope, sarky guy by the name of Aloth.

Loading is fine so far. Interface is a bit tricky at times but that seems to be par for the course for these kind of PC games ported to console.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Ben.

Aloth wears thin, but his quest is cool.

My final attempts to rescue my PS4 Blu-Ray drive have sadly failed, so I’m looking at buying TLoU2 digitally.

Price-wise it’s fine as it can actually be got slightly cheaper than the physical edition, but apparently the download is going to be 100GB!

I hope my router is up to it.

Use the rest mode, Dave

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Ben wrote:

Use the rest mode, Dave

I immediately heard this in Obi-Wan’s voice.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Good, good.

More seriously, you might be looking at 24 hour download

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Yeah, I wonder if it allows for a pre-load. I’d like to be able to play it on release day if I can.

I was wrong, Pillars of Eternity is all about its combat but it’s incomprehensible rubbish.  And it whacks the difficulty way up after the opening.

I will be in this temple, get attacked by some wraith – the party kills it in two seconds; get attacked by identical enemy, it takes ten times as long to kill.  More than one enemy? Fucked art thou and you don’t get XP from killing enemies.  Healing? Zero.  Any attacking options at all? Not really.  Even if you do use an “ability” you probably won’t see it do much.

The idea here is that you read the tiny, two-three line combat description box which is all the way over in the bottom right corner, while watching the combat in the rest of the screen, while also keeping on your stats in the bottom left and you can only see enemy status by hovering on them in exactly the right place.  It doesn’t mean much though because “nearly dead” still equals “can absolutely kill you”, even on the easiest difficulty.  Even zoomed in you will not be able to clearly see what is going on in combat, never mind respond to it.  Nor is there any way to assess or work out your chances or really evade combat, Divinity: Original Sin was pretty crappy for this too with enemies engaging with you from off the screen.

So: fiddly, unclear, frustrating, difficult = my response being to tell the game to go fuck itself.

It’s difficulty settings are a dark joke, I mean look at this:

Story Time – Story Time mode is for players who are more interested in exploration and story development than the challenge of combat. While Story Time is active, the enemy composition of battles is the same as Normal difficulty, but the game mechanics are biased in the player’s favor. Additionally, the party can carry an unlimited number of Camping Supplies.

If you haven’t played the game this means fuck all.  Whereas this:

Easy – The Easy difficulty requires minimal micromanagement an easily forgives mistakes in combat. It is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED for those who are new or recently-returning to real-time party-based RPGs.

Is an outright fucking lie because it certainly doesn’t fucking forgive anything, ever.  You’ll get more forgiveness from a Klingon or Darth Sidious.

So, yeah, didn’t last long.

I didn’t expect it to zoom up its own arse so fast as to be bathing in its own crap.  It’s not just the combat either, the game pretty much relishes being opaque and arcane in all its systems.  You will regularly have your party un-group for no reason you can see.  You can add to stash but not return.  And, for some people, this stuff represents a warm, fuzzy glow of nostalgia, of getting their head microwaved, I’m not one of them.

The only straight forward, interesting system here is the conversations one.  The rest of the time you will have no way to assess your party’s suitability for an area, no way to see enemy stats, no way to have any idea of strategy unless you somehow get to grips with very fiddly, radial menus and other controls, no way to tell the difference between identical looking enemies, or even see what the hell is going on.

Yeah.

I mean, you’re not wrong.  Probably took me 40 hours to learn the combat. And even then I was mostly spamming AOE spells, second win and empowerment.

If you have a cipher then the Charm skill is quite helpful to.even out the numbers.

Also, do a lot of baiting. Don’t take enemies on at once.

And resting is pretty essential.  It’s not unlike food in bloodstained.

But, also: yeah.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Well, kind of nice to know it ain’t just me.

Done a bit of looking around online and it appears that they just stuck a high-level dungeon slap bang in the middle of the first town you get to, without any indicators as to what it is.

So I might try and get a bigger party, all I had was Aloth.

Bigger problem remains that I’m not understanding the way the game works and it’s keeping very, very quiet about it.

Fair warning, it does not explain it.

You’ll have to go to gamefaqs to get a good idea of how the system works and what the stats mean.

Basically, the two things you need to be super conscious of is recovery time and interrupts.

Recovery time (also boosted by reflex and dexterity) means how long it takes your character to perform an action in real time. Things like armour reduce this significantly, so if you have a wizard like Aloth and you’ve loaded him up with plate armour then he’s useless because he will take 3 times as long to cast spells and be interrupted every time.

You have abilities which can interrupt enemies too, which is often useful to do.

The real time with pause aspect means you have to account for how long it takes to perform an action and be interrupted before, so you have to look at the positions of the enemy and what they’re doing.

On top of that, basically every enemy falls into one of four defensive categories – constitution, dexterity, intelligence and resolve. Each category has a corresponding offensive category: might, reflex, will and I forget the last one.

Basically, if your enemy has high intelligence, hitting them with will attacks is not as effective as hitting them with might attacks.

It’s a really hard system to learn and I wasn’t kidding when I said it feels designed for maths majors.  It’s complex, and at times very annoying.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Oh, also buffs (called inspirations) and rebuffs (called afflictions) are way way more important then it seems and also means the difference between winning and losing.

When you get Pallegina put loads of points into her inspirations and heals, she’s better as support then as a tank like Eder.

Because you’ll rely on the party AI a lot, stat boosting becomes pretty essential.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

I’ve been playing Star Trek: Judgment Rites this week. It’s the sequel to the 25th Anniversary adventure game and is largely more of the same, which is fine given its episodic format. Even as someone who doesn’t care much about Star Trek, having the original cast do the voice-overs is pretty cool. Unfortunately, the other people brought in aren’t nearly of the same calibre.

Mind you, the original cast’s return is undermined considerably by some really poor direction. Half the lines feel like they’re being read for the first time and get completely the wrong inflection and intonation for the situation. And this isn’t just limited to Shatner, like you’re probably assuming. For instance, a couple of times, Nimoy says “life-forms” as if it’s life in the act of forming rather than, you know, life-forms, which seems like a pretty fundamental misread for a Star Trek production.

On the other hand, the game has made the awful ship combat from the first game entirely optional, which is great. It really dragged down the previous one.

So is anyone watching the PS5 event in about an hour or so? I can’t decide whether to sit through it or just skim over the highlights tomorrow morning.

Dave wrote:

So is anyone watching the PS5 event in about an hour or so? I can’t decide whether to sit through it or just skim over the highlights tomorrow morning.

I rarely bother but this time I’m going to.

The choice is:

Watch it on the Usual Suspects – Gamespot / IGN – or do I instead go with a pair of sarcastic Aussies in the form of Laymen Gaming?

I think it’ll be Laymen Gaming.

I bought a preowned copy of Prey months ago for three quid. Only a few hours into it and while the game itself has been a positive experience the load times when transitioning between sections of the map really fucking suck the fun out of it.

Ben wrote:

Dave wrote:

So is anyone watching the PS5 event in about an hour or so? I can’t decide whether to sit through it or just skim over the highlights tomorrow morning.

I rarely bother but this time I’m going to.

The choice is:

Watch it on the Usual Suspects – Gamespot / IGN – or do I instead go with a pair of sarcastic Aussies in the form of Laymen Gaming?

I think it’ll be Laymen Gaming.

Yeah I’ve decided to stick it on. We’ll see what they have to reveal.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales – awesome.

Horizon Zero Dawn 2 looks pretty cool too.

Console itself looks a bit odd – those thin bits at the top look breakable. Interesting that they’re going with a digital-only option too.

And still no price details? Bit surprising.

 

[Ben]

OK, that was…. Well, how can I put this…… Oh yeah, Hol Lee Fuk.

After a disastrous opening – does anyone still give a damn about GTAV? – they recovered well.

The idea of a Spider-Man expansion as a launch title is damn smart and looks very good, but the surprise early showcase was Ratchet and Clank.  You have a ray-traced Clank looking far better than he does even on the full HDR’d PS4 game and then it was flipping from full 3D world to full 3D world, each very distinctive and different, in seconds! That is a far bigger deal than it looks because the speed of info supply to build those images is way, way up….. Oh and expect the Internet to be already burning over a female Ratchet.

After this it became more variable.  Couldn’t really work out a lot of the games.  The big surprise was Kena.  That game looks very, very good – had a Beyond Good & Evil vibe to it too.

And then there is the big one….. Horizon: The Forbidden West.  I will buy a PS5 to play that game, it looks fucking fantastic.  HZD, just with HDR on, is one of the best looking games on PS4, even four years later, but this was still beyond it.  The aquatic section, the war robo-mammoth, the new environments – this is how you do a system-selling game.

Finally, I really liked the design of the PS5 – it looks great, but there’s also a very canny sense to it as well.  In that, it has been put together to make it easier for people to buy and fit in with their PS3 and Ps4.  The vertical aspect means it won’t require that much space, which is damn smart.

I also like that there is no release date for H: TFW – take the time, get that right, I’ll wait and I’ll buy it.

Edit: Kena screenshots:

• This reply was modified 4 years, 6 months ago by Ben.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

I also liked the look of that astronaut/little girl one, and the epic space one with the rousing music.

But having Miles Morales at launch and then HZD2 to look forward to is enough for me.

(I’d like to know when I can buy it and how much it’ll cost at some point, though.)

1 user thanked author for this post.

Ben

Ben wrote:

a disastrous opening – does anyone still give a damn about GTAV?

Yeah that was laughable. GTA Online might still be very popular but opening with a PS3 game from 2013 doesn’t scream Next-Gen.

Shit Miles Morales may actually get me to buy the bastard thing.

Also Horizon 2 looks incredible, and more Resi Evil is always good.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Dave, Ben

Despite how tricky it is to play, have done some other sidequests in PoE. Have now gotten Eder and Durance and those two are changing it quite a bit, still wouldn’t class it as an easy game mind.

This is best illustrated by progressing a quest, being told to go kill stuff in a cave, but the creatures are super hard. Feels like a particularly sadistic bit of game design.

Not to detract from the ps5 thing (Miles!!) but I’ve purchased and installed DOOM (2016) today and… wow. This is nihilistic violence to the nth degree. I love it! Level design is cool, monsters, gore and takedowns looking fly… My only complaint is that it’s a lot easier than I thought it’d be. And I mean a lot. I’m playing at the hardest available setting and I’ve only died a couple of times in the first two-three “levels”. Mostly for blowing myself up, too.

Maybe I should switch from keyboard/mouse to controller. I’m sure it’ll get a lot harder, but it’ll also halve the life expectancy of the controller.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Bruce, Dave

You can tailor the AI to use certain abilities in a “If then then that” type situation.

It seemed too complicated for me but it might help if you invest some time into it.

Looking more into the PS5 stuff, Demons Souls remake is s mist get for me as a huge fan of the original.

Ratchet and Clanknlooks fun. Ghostwire Tokyo looks good. Death loop looks okay. Kena looks okay. Godfall doesn’t seem to do anything new. Havent looked at many others

So, cobbling together some information, it looks like the PS5 will likely launch with the following titles (or thereabouts):

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Assassins Creed: Valhalla

Deathloop

Godfall

Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2

Outriders

Jett: The Far Shore

NBA2K11

Bugsnax

Astro’s Playroom and GTA Online coming with the console.

and maybe Watch Dogs: Legion.  You could also add Hitman 3 to that list which is coming January.

Things like Cyberpunk 2077, Last of Us 2 and Avengers are sure to get PS5 releases, but whether they’re released in Holiday 2020 or later is another question (maybe it doesn’t matter with the backwards compatibility but I’m sure they’ll want to rejig PS5 specific releases to account for loading times and lighting effects).

Frankly, it’s  probably a slightly better release line-up than the PS4 which had Knack, Black Flag, Killzone: Shadowfall and a few other oddities.  I would say there is probably at least 3 titles that will be worth buying on release, which is probably a little more than the usual amount.

 

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

After receiving it for a birthday present earlier this year, today I finally finished reading through the Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works book from Read-Only Memory.

What a fantastic book – a wonderful account of the console’s history filled with great art and information that brought back a lot of happy memories of the Mega Drive era for me.

There’s just so much good information here. As well as a great opening essay giving an overview of the console’s history, there are detailed spec documents, concept designs and photos that go into tons of detail on the hardware side.

And then on the software side it’s even better. The book is full of gorgeous development/production art and box art that shows off the illustration style of the era magnificently.

There’s also plenty of in-depth behind-the-scenes stuff on key games of the era – the section on Gunstar Heroes in particular is a real treasure trove (no pun intended).

It’s also great to see some of the early concept drawings for characters and games we now know and love (a favourite for me was seeing lost levels and bosses from the first Sonic the Hedgehog).

And on top of that there’s a huge gallery of sprite and background art from the games themselves, which really shows the artistry that went in to these Megadrive-era games.

Capped off with an extensive interview section that gets loads of details and history from key people of the era, this is a wonderful document of what has always been my favourite console.

On the strength of this I’ve just ordered the companion Dreamcast book too. Can’t wait.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Bruce

TLoU2 reviews are everywhere. For those wanting to stay spoiler free, walk carefully

Yeah, I’ve made it this far spoiler-free so I’m not looking at any of those.

Anonymous wrote:

Not to detract from the ps5 thing (Miles!!) but I’ve purchased and installed DOOM (2016) today and… wow. This is nihilistic violence to the nth degree. I love it! Level design is cool, monsters, gore and takedowns looking fly… My only complaint is that it’s a lot easier than I thought it’d be. And I mean a lot. I’m playing at the hardest available setting and I’ve only died a couple of times in the first two-three “levels”. Mostly for blowing myself up, too.

Maybe I should switch from keyboard/mouse to controller. I’m sure it’ll get a lot harder, but it’ll also halve the life expectancy of the controller.

Let’s just say that this post didn’t age well. I’m having… problems.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Not to detract from the ps5 thing (Miles!!) but I’ve purchased and installed DOOM (2016) today and… wow. This is nihilistic violence to the nth degree. I love it! Level design is cool, monsters, gore and takedowns looking fly… My only complaint is that it’s a lot easier than I thought it’d be. And I mean a lot. I’m playing at the hardest available setting and I’ve only died a couple of times in the first two-three “levels”. Mostly for blowing myself up, too.

Maybe I should switch from keyboard/mouse to controller. I’m sure it’ll get a lot harder, but it’ll also halve the life expectancy of the controller.

Let’s just say that this post didn’t age well. I’m having… problems.

Also, Ultraviolence ain’t the hardest, I think you need to finish the game to unlock Nightmare? (or is that Ultra Nightmare?) =P

Replaying the original Portal with my son. It’s great watching the joy of each discovery all over again. Such a great game.

And as I’ve said before, I’m amazed by how good the kids’ spatial awareness is in these 3D worlds thanks to Minecraft – it’s obviously a key element of Portal and he just gets it.

3 users thanked author for this post.

Todd, Ben, Bruce

The coop mode in Portal 2 is great. That might be worth checking out too.

I just watched the coop trailer after typing the above and the music alone has put me right in the mood to replay Portal 2.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Dave

Yeah I played through some of that with my daughter the other day as she’s more familiar with Portal.

I think it’s much harder than both Portal 1 and Portal 2’s single-player campaigns though, the puzzles are much more complex with four portals to play with.

So I’m starting my son with Portal 1 and building up to all that.

(We’re playing it on the Orange Box on PS3 so he keeps asking to play Half-Life too…)

Talking of Portal, my daughter asked me to make a list of my top ten games of all time the other day. It was tough but this is what I came up with. (The crossed out ones are honorable mentions that didn’t make the cut.)

1 user thanked author for this post.

Bruce

(Looking at it now I’m not sure Mortal Kombat deserves it over some of those also-rans. But it got in on the metric of number of hours of entertainment over the years.)

This looks like a fun way to show off the new PS5 controller.