Video Games: A (Sonic 3D) Blast From The Past

[Corvinus85]

31 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The next step in the quest is not being triggered, the reward screen / sub-quest completion screen is not showing up (apart from that one time with one of the Greenskin quests, but other Greenskin deploy hero quests have consistently failed just like the Bretonnian ones and VC ones).

OK, well either you're not deploying the hero in the right region, or you are experiencing a bug. I'll say it's a bug, but I have not had this issue myself. 

[drawkcabi]

Anyone interested in Cuphead?

Quote

Cuphead is a classic run and gun action game heavily focused on boss battles. Inspired by cartoons of the 1930s, the visuals and audio are painstakingly created with the same techniques of the era, i.e. traditional hand drawn cel animation, watercolor backgrounds, and original jazz recordings.

Aside from the controversy with the game reporter which seems a whole lot of nothing. I'm a retro gamer but I also love classic animation and if anything would tempt me to get an XBOX it would be this game.

[Rhom]

10 hours ago, drawkcabi said:

Anyone interested in Cuphead?

Aside from the controversy with the game reporter which seems a whole lot of nothing. I'm a retro gamer but I also love classic animation and if anything would tempt me to get an XBOX it would be this game.

That game looks gorgeous.  I’ve not heard of it before.

[Werthead]

Divinity: Original Sin 2 picking up very strong reviews.

Seems baffling how a small studio like Larian can create proper, reactive RPGs with excellent combat and huge amounts of content and BioWare with all their millions can't any more. Bizarre.

[KiDisaster]

59 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Divinity: Original Sin 2 picking up very strong reviews.

Seems baffling how a small studio like Larian can create proper, reactive RPGs with excellent combat and huge amounts of content and BioWare with all their millions can't any more. Bizarre.

Ah, the good old EA effect. Homogenize and streamline till nothing interesting remains. 

---

DOS2 started strong and keeps getting better. Needs some serious patching though, it's pretty buggy. I was regretting making a battle mage cause I never used his magical abilities and wishing I'd just made a pure warrior instead. Thankfully there's a free respec option available once you get off the first island. Now my dual wielding, aerothurge dwarf is a two-handed hammer swinging monster, as it should have been from the beginning  

[briantw]

1 hour ago, KiDisaster said:

Ah, the good old EA effect. Homogenize and streamline till nothing interesting remains. 

---

DOS2 started strong and keeps getting better. Needs some serious patching though, it's pretty buggy. I was regretting making a battle mage cause I never used his magical abilities and wishing I'd just made a pure warrior instead. Thankfully there's a free respec option available once you get off the first island. Now my dual wielding, aerothurge dwarf is a two-handed hammer swinging monster, as it should have been from the beginning  

Yeah, the original was buggy as all hell too, which is why I recommended saving every couple of minutes.

[Werthead]

IGN gave Divinity: Original Sin 2 a monumentally high score. I haven't seen a score that high from them in a long time.

[Inigima]

I absolutely hated D:OS. Not didn't like, hated.

I picked up Metroid: Samus Returns and it's really good, amazingly. Really ticks all the boxes you'd want it to, as an old school 2D Metroid fan.

[briantw]

1 hour ago, Inigima said:

I absolutely hated D:OS. Not didn't like, hated.

Why?  It's a really fun game.

[Inigima]

10 hours ago, briantw said:

Why?  It's a really fun game.

Uh, obviously I disagree with your premise. I thought it was dogshit bad. I played it in co-op, and I thought it was incredibly tedious and the combat literally broke its own rules to punish the player. I put about ten and a half hours into it before quitting and I regret wasting that much of my life on it.

[Caligula_K3]

On 9/21/2017 at 1:54 PM, Werthead said:

Divinity: Original Sin 2 picking up very strong reviews.

Seems baffling how a small studio like Larian can create proper, reactive RPGs with excellent combat and huge amounts of content and BioWare with all their millions can't any more. Bizarre.

I know it's easy to shit on Bioware these days, but making a proper, reactive, RPG with excellent combat and huge amounts of content is hard. And much harder when you're doing AAA production, have hundreds of thousands of lines of voice acting that need to be recorded, need to work within a specific engine that wasn't tailored for RPGs, etc... And even for smaller studios making isometric RPGs, clearly making a masterpiece is hard as well (see Divinity Original Sin 1, the recent Obsidian games, etc...).

But I'm glad to see this game is getting such great reviews. It sounds very fun and I'm definitely going to pick it up, even though I wasn't a an of the first one- but it sounds like they improved on it in every way.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

8 hours ago, Inigima said:

Uh, obviously I disagree with your premise. I thought it was dogshit bad. I played it in co-op, and I thought it was incredibly tedious and the combat literally broke its own rules to punish the player. I put about ten and a half hours into it before quitting and I regret wasting that much of my life on it.

Co-op was bad unless you and your partner's characters were designed to be played together. And you had to be in lockstep with your partner when it came to combat. There were so many combo attacks that you could come up with between proper pairs that just weren't there with badly paired duos. The archer and the female mage synced up really well, for instance.

[briantw]

1 hour ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Co-op was bad unless you and your partner's characters were designed to be played together. And you had to be in lockstep with your partner when it came to combat. There were so many combo attacks that you could come up with between proper pairs that just weren't there with badly paired duos. The archer and the female mage synced up really well, for instance.

Yeah, I thought the co-op was the highlight.  My buddy and I ran a party with two mages (one earth and fire, one water and air), an archer, and a tank.  He controls the tank and the water mage, I control the fire mage and archer.  It's worked out pretty well for us.  We just use our mages to buff the shit out of his tank so she's immune to various elemental damages and then we lay waste to the battlefield with magic arrows, grenades, and spells.

I just love the combat because of how many different things you can do with it that no other game really provides.  You can teleport an oil crate into the middle of a battlefield and then set it on fire.  You can toss a water balloon onto enemies and then fry them with lightning.  You can cover the battlefield in poison gas and then detonate it.  There are just so many cool interactions between the elements, and it only gets better as you get further in the game and have access to new, more powerful abilities and are able to craft helpful tools like grenades more easily.

It does have a very steep learning curve, though, and the game tends to be pretty unforgiving.  We're playing on the default difficulty level (don't know if it's called normal or not) and we've gotten our asses kicked more than a few times.  As I mentioned above, it's very easy to wander into a fight you're not powerful enough to win.  But if you save often, it's not really an issue.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

6 minutes ago, briantw said:

Yeah, I thought the co-op was the highlight.  My buddy and I ran a party with two mages (one earth and fire, one water and air), an archer, and a tank.  He controls the tank and the water mage, I control the fire mage and archer.  It's worked out pretty well for us.  We just use our mages to buff the shit out of his tank so she's immune to various elemental damages and then we lay waste to the battlefield with magic arrows, grenades, and spells.

I just love the combat because of how many different things you can do with it that no other game really provides.  You can teleport an oil crate into the middle of a battlefield and then set it on fire.  You can toss a water balloon onto enemies and then fry them with lightning.  You can cover the battlefield in poison gas and then detonate it.  There are just so many cool interactions between the elements, and it only gets better as you get further in the game and have access to new, more powerful abilities and are able to craft helpful tools like grenades more easily.

It does have a very steep learning curve, though, and the game tends to be pretty unforgiving.  We're playing on the default difficulty level (don't know if it's called normal or not) and we've gotten our asses kicked more than a few times.  As I mentioned above, it's very easy to wander into a fight you're not powerful enough to win.  But if you save often, it's not really an issue.

Yeah, co-op was great when you had the right combination of characters. Some of the interactions between powers were really fun and creative. The archer was especially useful once you got to the point where he could make the different elemental arrows. 

[Werthead]

John Walker, who is one of the harshest video game critics on Earth, waxes extremely lyrical about the game here.

I want to go back and finish the first game, as I suspect if I play the second one (which is completely unrelated to the first apart from one character) that'll be a lot more difficult. But the reviews and the pleasing price make this a lot more tempting.

[briantw]

5 minutes ago, Manhole Eunuchsbane said:

Yeah, co-op was great when you had the right combination of characters. Some of the interactions between powers were really fun and creative. The archer was especially useful once you got to the point where he could make the different elemental arrows. 

Yeah, the archer is a fucking beast, especially when she gets some of her mid and late game abilities like rain of arrows and barrage.  And the elemental arrows work wonders with the two mages.  You can do a lot of cool shit with the combat system that just isn't possible in other games.  I've heard the second adds a lot of new interactions as well.

[Werthead]

Blasting through StarCraft: Remastered. I forgot how steeply Brood War increases the difficulty level. The game goes insane not very long into the Protoss campaign.

[Werthead]

Josh Sawyer basically talking about why New Vegas is awesome.

Which I have to agree with. More and more it seems that Obsidian nailed the Bethesda open-world game design in a way that Bethesda themselves have not done since at least Morrowind, and that's probably why Bethesda will never give them (or any other external company) another go at making a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game. A shame, given that at this current rate we'll be lucky to see another Fallout game in a decade.

[Slurktan]

On 9/22/2017 at 2:31 PM, Caligula_K3 said:

I know it's easy to shit on Bioware these days, but making a proper, reactive, RPG with excellent combat and huge amounts of content is hard. And much harder when you're doing AAA production, have hundreds of thousands of lines of voice acting that need to be recorded, need to work within a specific engine that wasn't tailored for RPGs, etc... And even for smaller studios making isometric RPGs, clearly making a masterpiece is hard as well (see Divinity Original Sin 1, the recent Obsidian games, etc...).

But I'm glad to see this game is getting such great reviews. It sounds very fun and I'm definitely going to pick it up, even though I wasn't a an of the first one- but it sounds like they improved on it in every way.

Its been easy to shit on Bioware because Bioware hasn't done anything actually original since Baldurs Gate 2.  They do the same basic plot over and over and over and sheep eat it up.

[Werthead]

42 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

Its been easy to shit on Bioware because Bioware hasn't done anything actually original since Baldurs Gate 2.  They do the same basic plot over and over and over and sheep eat it up.

They did change up once, with Dragon Age 2 (albeit at financial gunpoint from EA), and it worked quite well in that it forced them to do something different.

From what I can gather, they went straight back to their usual schtick afterwards.

But hey, their next game is a multiplayer-focused action game which may as well be called Attack on Titanfall, which is...interesting? I guess.