What game are you playing?

[Jynx]

I don't even know what a 'Dunkey' is. It's just a great game.

 

[thebeesknees22]

I finally got the damned Genji Gloves in FF7 rebirth.

F those minigames ... F those minigames straight to hell. I'm so done with them.

... but now to try finishing it on hard mode.

 

[wankerness]

I finally got the damned Genji Gloves in FF7 rebirth.

F those minigames ... F those minigames straight to hell. I'm so done with them.

... but now to try finishing it on hard mode.

Yesterday I tried starting the brutal challenges, and….F. I narrowly beat the first one, and then died horribly to the second one a couple times (once on the tenth wave, meaning it was like 25 minutes to get back to the same point).

I think I have every single mini game and hard mode phenomena done besides the frog jump, the final "nightmare survival" challenge of Queen's Blood, and cactuar crush. I just haven’t really tried the latter on hard yet, but it seems like it will be bad as Aerith. And I hated the frog game enough that I’m not going to bother unless I clear all the hard battle stuff first. Queen's Blood I'll just follow a guide on, I can't be F'd on some of the hardest matches. It's a cool game and I like it one hell of a lot more than the FF8 card game where I just couldn't understand rules in some regions, but by the end of the game you have SO many cards that have crazy different effects and there are so many synergies that unless you want to spend hours studying it you're better off with a guide.

From what I’ve heard you need to clear the brutal modes first to get gotterdamerung or whatever the ultimate cloud weapon is to make some of the hard mode chapters doable. In particular that duel against the gun guy in chapter 11 or 12 is supposed to just be insane if you haven’t already done all the grinding and optimization ahead of time.

I’m currently just seeing that I need to grind thousands of AP to make the right Materia loadouts, and it doesn’t seem fun. Like, several materia I had equipped from the moment I got them until now, and they still are nowhere close to maxed out. AP grind is AWFUL.

I bought Animal Well, Another Crab's Treasure, and Stellar Blade all at the same time cause I'm an idiot.

Animal Well I've played for about an hour. I mainly just have no idea where I'm going or what I'm trying to do, which I think is the point, but as a dumb gamer I have a hard time with that. I have gotten one item so far that seems to qualify as a metroidvania type upgrade (a bubble blower, which you can use to get to higher ledges because you can jump on the bubble).

I started Another Crab's Treasure and beat the first couple bosses (I died to the first boss like 7 times). I like it, but don't love it. I do like the general idea of it, and I find it amusing that they really did make it a regular difficulty soulslike, but I don't like the wonkiness of the camera or the tight dodge timings, and I haven't gotten used to the parry yet (unlike every other game with parries ever, you have to RELEASE block at the right time instead of press it). It has the exact same "stagger" as Lies of P, which I didn't like - when you've done enough damage their health bar starts flashing, but they don't actually get staggered until you then hit them with a charge attack in that short window, which is much easier said than done. The puns are also definitely going to get old soon.

Stellar Blade I started this morning. I think I'm just going to burn through it on story mode first. The combat feels great, I think the parry system is much more fun and a bit easier so far than Lies of P.

 

[thebeesknees22]

Yesterday I tried starting the brutal challenges, and….F. I narrowly beat the first one, and then died horribly to the second one a couple times (once on the tenth wave, meaning it was like 25 minutes to get back to the same point).

I think I have every single mini game and hard mode phenomena done besides the frog jump, the final "nightmare survival" challenge of Queen's Blood, and cactuar crush. I just haven’t really tried the latter on hard yet, but it seems like it will be bad as Aerith. And I hated the frog game enough that I’m not going to bother unless I clear all the hard battle stuff first. Queen's Blood I'll just follow a guide on, I can't be F'd on some of the hardest matches. It's a cool game and I like it one hell of a lot more than the FF8 card game where I just couldn't understand rules in some regions, but by the end of the game you have SO many cards that have crazy different effects and there are so many synergies that unless you want to spend hours studying it you're better off with a guide.

From what I’ve heard you need to clear the brutal modes first to get gotterdamerung or whatever the ultimate cloud weapon is to make some of the hard mode chapters doable. In particular that duel against the gun guy in chapter 11 or 12 is supposed to just be insane if you haven’t already done all the grinding and optimization ahead of time.

I’m currently just seeing that I need to grind thousands of AP to make the right Materia loadouts, and it doesn’t seem fun. Like, several materia I had equipped from the moment I got them until now, and they still are nowhere close to maxed out. AP grind is AWFUL.

I bought Animal Well, Another Crab's Treasure, and Stellar Blade all at the same time cause I'm an idiot.

Animal Well I've played for about an hour. I mainly just have no idea where I'm going or what I'm trying to do, which I think is the point, but as a dumb gamer I have a hard time with that. I have gotten one item so far that seems to qualify as a metroidvania type upgrade (a bubble blower, which you can use to get to higher ledges because you can jump on the bubble).

I started Another Crab's Treasure and beat the first couple bosses (I died to the first boss like 7 times). I like it, but don't love it. I do like the general idea of it, and I find it amusing that they really did make it a regular difficulty soulslike, but I don't like the wonkiness of the camera or the tight dodge timings, and I haven't gotten used to the parry yet (unlike every other game with parries ever, you have to RELEASE block at the right time instead of press it). It has the exact same "stagger" as Lies of P, which I didn't like - when you've done enough damage their health bar starts flashing, but they don't actually get staggered until you then hit them with a charge attack in that short window, which is much easier said than done. The puns are also definitely going to get old soon.

Stellar Blade I started this morning. I think I'm just going to burn through it on story mode first. The combat feels great, I think the parry system is much more fun and a bit easier so far than Lies of P.

yeah I'm pretty sure i'll never get the gotterdamerung-whatchamacallit. I gave up on trying to get that in Remake too.

there are some things that just aren't worth the time and frustration lol

 

[gabito]

I’ve been playing Animal Well.

Yeah… fuck that game

It reminds me of an old old OLD game I played when I was a kid called Abu Simbel: Profanation which was a very similar puzzle / platformer super difficult and cryptic game. Impossibly difficult for 8 year old me and to this day I don’t think many people could finish it.

Animal Well very charming and obviously very well made. I want to like it, but dealing with jumping platforms while avoiding floating blobs, solving cryptic puzzles, finding keys I don’t know where to use, finding tools I don’t know how to use… it gives me 80s kid PTSD.

I think they were maybe talking to a more “gamer like” kind of audience when they talked about the game, but it’s a bit more difficult than I expected. My tolerance for frustration is almost zero these days.

I know they were going for that vibe but… fuck that, give me my Sony made for tired adults Hollywood-like game that makes me question why I don’t just watch movies and sell my console anyway.

I’ll try to keep playing it, but there’s only so much jumping, dying and going back to a checkpoint I can tolerate Been there done that, 35 years ago. Didn’t like it, but there weren’t many options.

 

[TedEH]

^ That kinda sounds like my attempt at Rain World. Tried it. It was brutal and didn't explain itself. Probably would need a lot of time investment to really "get it", but lots of "true gamers" will probably love it.

 

[wankerness]

Animal well’s press all describes it as quite easy if you’re not doing the completionist stuff after the “ending.” I don’t think it’s that hard mechanically yet, it’s more just I have no idea where to go. It’s probably more rewarding if you don’t look it up, but I will probably end up looking at a walkthrough if I get stuck for too long.

 

[gabito]

^ That kinda sounds like my attempt at Rain World. Tried it. It was brutal and didn't explain itself. Probably would need a lot of time investment to really "get it", but lots of "true gamers" will probably love it.

Yeah, at first it reminded me of Rain World too (the graphics are kind of similar and for a short moment I thought it was the same game when I saw the first of dunkey’s videos). It’s not THAT difficult though.

 

[StevenC]

I've been replaying Metal Gear Solid because I enjoy meaningless games with no political agenda.

 

[TedEH]

I legitimately need to keep playing those. I played MGS1, enjoyed it, never got back to 2.

 

[gabito]

I legitimately need to keep playing those. I played MGS1, enjoyed it, never got back to 2.

I’ve said this before, but… play it. Every MGS is great. No rose-tinted glasses, I played all the games for the first time in 2017 IIRC and then again a few years later.

Except V, that one is a piece of shit (not the gameplay, it’s the best in the series).

 

[gabito]

Still playing Animal Well... it always amazed me how some people can finish games like this without a guide, tips, or some kind of help.

Didn't use one so far... but in fact I don't know if I could finish it even with a guide. Trying to find something in a guide must be as hard a finding something in this fucking game

I'm ambivalent as to whether I like this one or not. It's an obviously pretty well made game, but I fucking hate not knowing what to do next, or how to do it, or going around the (very big) map aimlessly just to see if I missed something (which I surely did), or maybe I didn't use some of the tools I have so far properly, or maybe I'm missing some tool that's needed to do what I want to do... I wish I knew.

I found 6 of the (I think) 8 tools, and only one of the flames (of which I guess there are 4), and I've been stuck for a few hours now, listening to some cats meowing non-stop and escaping from a kangaroo that attacks me for no reason.

This game reminds me of why I was so happy when games started to explain themselves better, be more intuitive, etc. Maybe I would have finished more than 3 games in my childhood and teenage years if they were like that decades ago...

 

[p0ke]

Got to the Fume Knight in DS2. I got his HP down to about 1/3 on my first attempt, then I tried with the summon and he had so much more hp it felt like I'm throwing snowballs at him or something. So seems like solo will be easier in this case, I just feel like I need to get some really heavy weapon that only does physical damage, since apparently he's immune to basically everything. Otherwise the strategy is basically the same as with the pursuer, just strafing left instead of right...

 

[wankerness]

Got to the Fume Knight in DS2. I got his HP down to about 1/3 on my first attempt, then I tried with the summon and he had so much more hp it felt like I'm throwing snowballs at him or something. So seems like solo will be easier in this case, I just feel like I need to get some really heavy weapon that only does physical damage, since apparently he's immune to basically everything. Otherwise the strategy is basically the same as with the pursuer, just strafing left instead of right...

Fume knight is a boss I always use a fast 2H weapon on. I usually use red iron twinblade, that one does a lot of damage. And yeah summoning is a terrible idea. You just have to learn to roll through his stuff.

I usually cheese him by wearing velstadt’s helm. That makes him rage out and go into phase 2 immediately. He hits harder in phase 2 but his attacks are way more easy to learn and roll through (besides the twirling fireball explosion) and you’re only dealing with one moveset.

 

[Jynx]

Animal Well very charming and obviously very well made. I want to like it, but dealing with jumping platforms while avoiding floating blobs, solving cryptic puzzles, finding keys I don’t know where to use, finding tools I don’t know how to use… it gives me 80s kid PTSD.

This is the exact reason I love it. It reminds me of old Commodore 64 games like Dizzy or Flimbo's Quest only with much smoother controls.

 

[wankerness]

I kind of love Stellar Blade. It's like they played Nier Automata and took nothing from it other than the setting, the music, and that you played as a sexy cyborg and just amped all of that up. It has absolutely none of its story depth, and the music just attempts slavishly to sound like Nier Automata but without any of the actual compositional innovation. But, man is the combat fun. The combat is just leagues beyond Nier, I love it. Except when you get attacked by turrets, which are hard to deal with. I'm not that far in (last boss I fought was the one you can only use guns on), and I'm playing on easy, so I would imagine I'd be getting way more frustrated about some of the wonkier enemies that are harder to read/react to (mainly the horses with hammerhead shark heads, and the damn tentacles) if they were actually able to kill me in a couple hits.

My one thing I really hate are the crates you have to open by playing a minigame where you have a tight timer to react to a whole ton of button prompts, and they appear in random spots on a grid. I just don't have the reflexes necessary to do it! It usually takes me like 10 tries a box. I think it would be easier with a smaller TV so you didn't have to scan around the screen every time a prompt changes.

Oh, I also hate the voice of your stupid assistant girl (she looks like the loathed character from Borderlands 3) - she has that stereotypical really whiny high pitched anime girl voice. It's fingernails on a blackboard! I'm playing with the Korean audio, guessing the English dub is probably not great on this game.

 

[thebeesknees22]

I kind of love Stellar Blade. It's like they played Nier Automata and took nothing from it other than the setting, the music, and that you played as a sexy cyborg and just amped all of that up. It has absolutely none of its story depth, and the music just attempts slavishly to sound like Nier Automata but without any of the actual compositional innovation. But, man is the combat fun. The combat is just leagues beyond Nier, I love it. Except when you get attacked by turrets, which are hard to deal with. I'm not that far in (last boss I fought was the one you can only use guns on), and I'm playing on easy, so I would imagine I'd be getting way more frustrated about some of the wonkier enemies that are harder to read/react to (mainly the horses with hammerhead shark heads, and the damn tentacles) if they were actually able to kill me in a couple hits.

My one thing I really hate are the crates you have to open by playing a minigame where you have a tight timer to react to a whole ton of button prompts, and they appear in random spots on a grid. I just don't have the reflexes necessary to do it! It usually takes me like 10 tries a box. I think it would be easier with a smaller TV so you didn't have to scan around the screen every time a prompt changes.

Oh, I also hate the voice of your stupid assistant girl (she looks like the loathed character from Borderlands 3) - she has that stereotypical really whiny high pitched anime girl voice. It's fingernails on a blackboard! I'm playing with the Korean audio, guessing the English dub is probably not great on this game.

I tried to get into the demo, but the controls were just a tad clunky. Not sure if the full game is polished a bit better or not

 

[BlackMastodon]

I'm boycotting Stellar Blade until they make the male characters also wear the same nanotech skinsuit. If I don't see ball and peen physics flailing around in combat then it ain't worth it. Equity or bust.

 

[TedEH]

I think what you're looking for is Cyberpunk.

 

[Jynx]

Wasn't massively moved by the Stellar Blade demo either. Will undoubtedly play it at some point but not dropping 80 quid on it.

I don't drop that on any single player experiences that can wait any more anyway though so don't read too much into that.

Usually only multiplayer games I might want to jump straight onto with my friends I buy day one these days.