What game are you playing?

[gasolinedreams]

I'm pretty sure I'm never going to escape Dominator rank in Tekken 8 playing as Azucena. When games go well, I whoop ass, but most of the time I get rolled because I suck at juggling. Guess I gotta work on my aerial juggles.

Just learn a basic combo and then abuse her running move(WR3,2. Or if you're not familiar with tekken notations it's ->->->, x, triangle on playstation) and you'll get to red ranks with her.
first combo in this video seems to work off of most launchers.

She's getting a pretty major overhaul in the patch that's dropping this week, though.
Until that drops, you're +5 frames on block(+2 after the patch) after WR3,2. So you're free to do whatever, pressure with jabs, df1, go for a grab or whatever. Since a standard jab is 10 frames, as long as your move is faster than 15 frames you'll beat all options most characters have, there are a few exceptions that can interrupt. After the patch your options will be more limited.

Use the replay mode to your advantage in matchups that are giving you trouble, it shows you what moves are punishable, which strings you can duck and launch, etc. Or if you're too lazy to do that, like I am, just watch good Azucena players and try to see how they deal with different situations, how they pressure, how they punish, what moves they're using to open up opponents and so on.

Tekken is a really hard game. You're bound to lose a lot in order to learn. Just don't get discouraged and try to learn something from every match you play and you'll see improvement.

 

[Ralyks]

I gave in and got Stellar Blade. Guess I liked the demo more that I thought ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Figired this, FFVII Rebirth, Like a Dragon, and whenever I decide to get the last two trophies I need for Persona 3 Reload (which is going to require a NG+ playthrough because I barely missed on balancing confidants vs increasing social stats) could possibly take me to the end of the year. Or whenever Metaphor: ReFantazio comes out.

 

[wankerness]

I'm thinking about getting Stellar Blade. My main concern is that it might feel more like a Bayonetta than a Souls game, I love the latter but the former tends to make me exhausted with all the button mashing.

I finished up everything I'm interested in with FF7 rebirth right now - got all achievements besides "get stagger damage to 300%" (I think it's impossible on lower difficulties cause everything dies too fast), "beat all extreme difficulty battle challenges," "beat the game on hard," and then "get every single minigame to max rank as well as beat all extreme difficulty battle challenges." Ugh. I might poke my head into the hard challenges and see if I can get Cloud's ultimate weapon, if so I might mess with it a bit, but I've seen a TON of complaints online about the last challenge where you have to fight TEN superbosses in a row and if you die on the last one you start over from the beginning, so like 30+ minutes an attempt basically with no way to practice the final hardest one. This game is like, the anti-FFXVI, where if you died in the middle of a battle, you wouldn't just start on the same boss, you'd start on the same boss health checkpoint, and also get healed to full, and also get all your healing items restocked. And that was on normal difficulty!!

Last night, I started up the Nightdive remaster of Dark Forces 1. They did it again, those beautiful bastards. It looks like the Mac version instead of the crappy DOS version, but additionally it was stretched to widescreen in an actual good way that preserves what I remember about the game while making it look way better if you actually look at side by side screenshots. They also totally re-rendered all the cutscenes so they look like I remember, but are way, WAY higher resolution. It's a lot like the Metroid Prime "remaster." I'd forgotten a few aspects of this, like how it had a few polygonal objects (gun turrets for example) thrown into what was mainly a typical Doom/Duke Nukem style sprite shooter. Anyway, I burned through the first four levels in about an hour, so I think this game must have only been like 10 hours long, but I'm fine with that! I need something quick after spending weeks on FF7 Rebirth.

I'd forgotten the bizarre sound effects. Every time a guy shoots at you it sounds like someone's yelling HA! I don't know what that is even supposed to be. Never did.

 

[gabito]

Abandoned Mafia III. Every mission is EXACTLY THE SAME MISSION, even the “bosses”.

“Go there, shoot some guys, steal their money and destroy some stuff”

Every mission. Every enemy. No variation at all.

I’d keep playing but the story is uninteresting and delivered in an awkward way, and the characters dull. I can’t even remember the protagonist’s name.

 

[Werecow]

Abandoned Mafia III. Every mission is EXACTLY THE SAME MISSION, even the “bosses”.

“Go there, shoot some guys, steal their money and destroy some stuff”

Every mission. Every enemy. No variation at all.

I’d keep playing but the story is uninteresting and delivered in an awkward way, and the characters dull. I can’t even remember the protagonist’s name.

It's been years and years since i played it, but Mafia 1 was one of my all-time great gaming experiences. It's probably aged terribly now, but the story, missions, and voice acting were so great at the time.
Is Mafia 2 any good do you know?

 

[gabito]

It's been years and years since i played it, but Mafia 1 was one of my all-time great gaming experiences. It's probably aged terribly now, but the story, missions, and voice acting were so great at the time.
Is Mafia 2 any good do you know?

It’s supposed to be good, but I haven’t played it (yet). It’s been remastered not too long ago.

There’s a Mafia I remake that looks even better than II’s remaster, but I’m yet to play it.

 

[Ralyks]

I'm thinking about getting Stellar Blade. My main concern is that it might feel more like a Bayonetta than a Souls game, I love the latter but the former tends to make me exhausted with all the button mashing.

Yeah, you can't button mash this game. I'm starting to see why people think it's Sekiro + Nier. I'm only maybe an hour and change in but it's pretty cool. But yeah, you gotta have your dodging and parrying down.

 

[wankerness]

Hopefully the timing on parries in Stellar Blade is really forgiving like Sekiro as opposed to something much nastier like Lies of P or FF7 remake/rebirth. I'm feeling bad at games right now after playing through both FF7 Rebirth and Dark Forces on easy. Ah well.

I finished Dark Forces. The one thing I do not like about the Nightdive version is they intentionally kept the same save system as the original - I guess they felt save states would be undermining its artistic vision or something. So, it has this whack-ass save system where you can't save AT ALL and thus kind of have to go through the entire thing in one sitting unless you want to start a level over from nothing. It does have lives, though, and if you die it like, respawns you back a tiny way but keeps all the level progress you'd made. So, if you suck at a boss, you can just hit it a few times, die, hit it a few more times, etc until it dies (or you run out of lives). I'd like to replay Jedi Knight and Jedi Knight Outcast, but there's currently no console port of the first and the console port of the second was made by those clowns at Aspyr so it is supposed to be awful in terms of controls.

Now I just started Turok 1, the remaster. I played through this game a few times as a kid. Boy, is it infuriating with a modern eye. The enemies that respawn like crazy are especially obnoxious, since they almost never drop much ammo or health, so the game feels like a survival horror in terms of your ammo conservation if you don't rush through levels as fast as possible. Also, the levels are gargantuan, and you have to find three keys and one weapon piece in every level, and they're usually hidden with no indication whatsoever that you missed one untilyou get to the level exit and realize you don't have them all, at which point you have to backtrack all through the levels looking for them. I remember Turok 2 being even worse in this regard cause the levels were far bigger - I'm hoping I'll find that the keys at least are more obviously placed. It's hard enough getting through the levels, having all the key items be easily missable is just mean!

The controls feel pretty fluid. I hate platforming in FPS games, but this game really did have about the best feeling jump mechanics I can remember in one. Everything feels really responsive and I like that you go further based on how long you hold the button down. Graphics are laughably dated, of course, but I can still easily flip my brain back to N64 mode.

Now I want to play Blast Corps. They need to hurry up and release Rare Replay for all platforms now that Xbox has given up on exclusives. I installed Shadow Man, I might try that next, though I think that one might end up feeling TOO dated. FPS games tend to be pretty timeless as far as mechanics go, as long as you're not trying to play Goldeneye 64 with the original control scheme or something.

 

[Werecow]

Arkane
That's probably the last chance of Immersive sims with any budget gone forever. Upsetting.

 

[wankerness]

Microsoft is trying to out-EA EA!

Next they'll probably do it to Obsidian.

 

[Werecow]

Microsoft is trying to out-EA EA!

Next they'll probably do it to Obsidian.

Exactly EA tactics, yeh. Buy a dev, put them to work on projects the dev has no experience or culture with, be disappointed with the results.
Arkane Lyon working on a 3rd-person Marvel action game sounded ridiculous on announcement. Now it's probably do or die for them.

 

[wankerness]

What people rightly seem most incensed about is the studio that just made Hifi Rush, which is like the only Xbox exclusive anyone has cared about in the last couple years, just got shut down for bad sales too. Guess why the sales were crap? CAUSE THEY PUT IT ON GAMEPASS DAY ONE. So everyone with an xbox played it, and almost none of them bought it cause they didn't have to. So dumb. Microsoft's Xbox division are just like, eating themselves.

 

[wankerness]

I'm now on level 6 of 8 in Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and I'm just in awe that I beat this back in middle school/high school or whenever it was (I remember buying it when it was newly a "player's choice" for 40 bucks). This game is incredibly punishing compared to basically everything made in the last 20 years. Enemies respawn like crazy even on easy difficulty, like you'll take out three enemies and two of them will be back to life in 30 seconds. There will be these huge long platforming segments on tiny platforms over bottomless cliffs, and if you die, you lose one of your limited lives and go back sometimes minutes to a checkpoint to try again. If you run out of lives, it's game over, you have to start over again your last manual save (save points are every 20 minutes or so, and since if you die after using a save point it respawns you there, you're pretty much never going to think to load a save instead of taking the death). I get the argument that allowing quicksave trivializes the game, but ouch. Infinite lives seems like it would have been a reasonable compromise. I guess back in 1998 most games were still operating on Arcade/NES logic of "of course you have limited lives! that's just how games are!" when in reality those mostly just existed to suck quarters out of pockets/make kids take weeks to beat a game that is beatable in like 2 hours with freeze states. I am not sure when that shift to infinite lives occurred in earnest. Probably the next generation?

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to handle playing through 2, though at least they have quicksave enabled on that one. I think I'd need a guide to find all the damn keys. I remember the levels being like 3x bigger than the ones in Turok 1, which is really saying something - the levels in Turok 1 are just gigantic compared to the likes of Quake and other contemporaries.

 

[gabito]

I am not sure when that shift to infinite lives occurred in earnest. Probably the next generation?

I always thought that GTA III was responsible for this (or maybe it popularized it?). I vividly remember thinking "Oh, it doesn't matter if I die? Cool! I wish all games were like this."

And then almost all games were like that. At least for some time.

 

[gasolinedreams]

Hopefully the timing on parries in Stellar Blade is really forgiving like Sekiro as opposed to something much nastier like Lies of P or FF7 remake/rebirth.

I've only played the Stellar Blade demo, waiting for a sale. But from what I understand the consensus is that the parry window is pretty lenient in this game. It certainly didn't feel as punishing as Lies of P. I can't wait for the Lies of P DLC, though. I loved that game. It is probably my favorite souls-like along with the Nioh games.

 

[wankerness]

Lies of P was excellent but I did hate the perfect parries on most fights purely cause of outrageous swing delays and fakeouts from most bosses, and the fact you had to actually time it precisely instead of having the ability to hit it repeatedly and only have to have hit the button at the same time ala Sekiro. It was WAY more punishing than Sekiro and about on par with Wo Long's stupid red deflects on higher difficulties. The game just had enough leeway for play styles, especially once you unlocked more abilities (ex better dodges, less health lost/more health regained through the blocking), that most bosses you could beat without having to ever do it. So like, by the end I'd call the game considerably easier than Sekiro, just not for deflects specifically. However, I did beat the last boss a couple times before they nerfed the shit out of the shield, so maybe I would now find it Sekiro level of difficulty.

I'm definitely looking forward to that DLC. I am also curious about this Another Crab's Treasure game that everyone's talking about right now. I saw IronPineapple's video of the demo several months ago and it looked amusing but tedious, but the reviews have been really good so I guess they fixed the issues!

Anyway, now I'm on the last level of Turok. I'm going to be glad to be done with this game. No way am I replaying the levels for 100% secrets, it doesn't even have a platinum trophy! It was kind of fun revisiting this and finding that the controls REALLY hold up and that the arsenal is as fun as ever and that all the music/sound effects were burned into my consciousness, but boy is the game design punishing. Every time a big segment of tiny platforms rises up I just groan, harder as I get further past the last checkpoint/save point.

I'll check out Turok 2, at least. My memory was that the levels were vastly more complex than Turok 1, even, so that seems like something I'll want to use a walkthrough for. When I beat it as a kid I had some walkthrough out of the back of a Game Informer magazine so I didn't have to replay levels repeatedly trying to find the last primagen key.

I want to play Turok 3 cause it seems the modern opinion is that it holds up much better than 1/2, plus I never played it. I guess it uses much more linear, "cinematic" level design more like a Half Life 2 or something rather than Turok 1/2's giant Quake-like labyrinths.

 

[Jynx]

Check out this new Metroidvania. It's free on PS Plus Extra if you have it. Currently 10/10 on Steam. Go in as blind as possible.

 

[wankerness]

I played Animal Well for about 30 minutes, it definitely did not grab me yet. I didn't realize it was a metroidvania until I started playing it. I suspect once I start understanding how you're supposed to react to things that it will make more sense. I mean, like right now it's very unclear what creatures you encounter will do damage to you vs you can stand on them or whatever.

 

[TedEH]

It's free on PS Plus Extra

Oooooh heyo - I was going to wait, but if it's on the Plus, I might give this a shot. I was skeptical of Dunkey's pompous "I personally have the power to weed out the GOOD games with my magical good taste and influence and I'll prove it to you by being a publisher" attitude, but reviews so far have shown I may have judged too quickly.

 

[gabito]

I'll buy it later, I think Dunkey has a good eye for games.

Based on that, I'm almost sure the game is good. Not sure I'll like it though, he's more into the "gameplay" part of games and I'm more into stories or interesting experiences but there's no harm in trying.

That said, I'm still sporadically playing NBA On Fire Edition (contradicting my previous statement about liking stories ). I plan to win everything there's to win eventually, but the AI is a bitch so it'll take time.

I have Starfield and a few other PC games installed on my ROG Ally, but I'm not sure I want to commit to play any of those now.