On Breath of the Wild bosses: the bow and sword are not the only things you have that do damage.

PS4 - Pillars of Eternity, which translates quite well onto console.

Switch - Lego City Undercover, which is quite fun!

Ghouls and Ghosts - Arcade.
Still.
I've not been this hooked on a game for a very, very long time.
This has been nearly 2 months...

OneCreditBen wrote: ↑January 16th, 2018, 11:16 am Ghouls and Ghosts - Arcade.
Still.
I've not been this hooked on a game for a very, very long time.
This has been nearly 2 months...

So having noticed that you were playing this and knowing that it’s coming up on the list for this year, I checked in with it on the SNES recently for old times sake.

I got to the bit after the first sort of raised platform and the snake thing, then remembered why I don’t play it - game crippling slow down, even worse than R-Type on the same platform .

Looking forward to seeing your successful video .

Suits wrote: ↑January 16th, 2018, 12:02 pm

OneCreditBen wrote: ↑January 16th, 2018, 11:16 am Ghouls and Ghosts - Arcade.
Still.
I've not been this hooked on a game for a very, very long time.
This has been nearly 2 months...

So having noticed that you were playing this and knowing that it’s coming up on the list for this year, I checked in with it on the SNES recently for old times sake.

I got to the bit after the first sort of raised platform and the snake thing, then remembered why I don’t play it - game crippling slow down, even worse than R-Type on the same platform .

Looking forward to seeing your successful video .

You're right there's some really bad slowdown on the SNES version.
Also you can't shoot upwards/downwards which is a strange little omission.

Having played so much of the arcade version over the past few months I can really see the differential in the two games. It's odd really looking at it now, the SNES one almost feels like half a Ghouls/Ghosts game and half a Capcom Disney platformer.

I'm not sure which one is more difficult though. The arcade version is shorter but there's so much horrific RNG in the way enemies appear that there are literally spots that occur that you can't do anything about. The SNES version feels like much more of a grind because of how long all the levels are.

They're both cool games, but I've enjoyed the arcade Ghouls and Ghosts more.

Flabyo wrote: ↑January 15th, 2018, 7:07 pm On Breath of the Wild bosses: the bow and sword are not the only things you have that do damage.

Oh my god this boss in Zelda is driving me insane, who needs dark souls

I have gone back into the world to buy more arrows and find some more bows because of course none of the shops sell weapons they just sell ammo which is a ridiculous business model if you ask me!.

I beat that one by cooking up a lot of healing items that add bonus hearts.

I’ve always thought it weird that the small amount of signposting the game has points you to that divine beast first, as it’s not the easiest of them. (I say signposting, it’s more that it’s the nearest to your position when you first get told to seek them out)

Still in the 'trading game' mood from the weekend, I reinstalled X3 Albion Prelude, having failed to get to grips with its successor.

I suppose what I mean by 'trading' is really 'supply chain', ie not just selling a product but arranging for the raw materials and manufacturing it, eventually setting up a production chain/closed loop etc.

I think what got me into this type of game was, surprisingly enough, an MMO - Black Desert Online from 2016. In that game you could hire workers and put them to work mining or harvesting crops, and set others up in a workshop to turn the ores into tools, which you could sell on the open market. Unfortunately you couldn't totally automate it - you had to intervene at several points in order to smelt down the ores, and to brew beer from crops to feed the workers (yes). So it turned out to entail logging in each day and watching your character smelt ore for an hour.

But that was a super interesting economy.

In Albion Prelude you can build orbital manufacturing plants which have to be supplied with raw materials using your own or NPC freighters, set prices so that NPC traders will buy them etc. For my fledgling space empire I've set up a wheat fabrication space station (which itself needed me to hire a mammoth spaceship to transport it from the shipyard) near two NPC bakeries producing Meatsteak Cahoonas, a type of interstellar pie. I need to keep that supplied, and eventually will use the wheat as an ingredient in another factory producing something else with greater value. It is slow work though.

All this means that I now have three 'endless' games on the go - Skyrim, The Long Dark and Albion Prelude. Not ideal.

Stardew Valley is the best chillout game of all time. I put it on and manage a day before I am fast asleep.

I got motion sickness playing a game today which has never happened outside of VR in 30 years of gaming.

It happened playing Resident Evil 4!. The camera feels too close and jerky so I will see how I get on as I want to finish it in time for the show. I have already finished it before on Gamecube and Wii and never had an issue.

Arms and SFV arcade edition are taking all of my time at the moment. I didn't expect much from either but they are both excellent and a nice break from Zelda BOTW which is massively annoying me at the moment.

Honestly, don't even bother using the camera in RE4 if it causes any problem whatsoever. It's not a dual analogue-based game.

I'm checking out tactical stealth puzzler Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun on the PS4. It's very good, and Flabyo's post gives a nice flavour of what it's about.

Last night I completed a level in 2 hours 27 minutes, and then watched a speedrun of the level that was completed in 4m 20s, so that was pretty good.

Really enjoying it though, it is simple enough to not overwhelm, while not being a walkover on Normal difficulty either. It encourages you to save scum (there's a timer prominently displayed which shows minutes and seconds since last save, and which flashes to remind you to save) and then broadcasts to your PSN friends, "Chopper has saved 150 times in Shadow Tactics".

I'm starting Tomb Raider: Underworld! When that's done, I'll be ready to tackle the "modern" Tomb Raider games, but for now, I'm happy to revisit the Legend trilogy one more time.

Having major lag problems playing Demon's Souls, with the game becoming a slide show and the sound becoming all broken up and stuttery. Restarting the game and turning the PS3 on and off didn't help. Reading up online, it's apparently a server problem and the solution is to play offline. Sigh. So I guess it will be better to play once the servers are shut down by the end of February?

Also, I had another stab at trying to finish Fire Emblem: Awakening. I've been playing Hard-Classic, which I should be able to handle with my experience with the series, but those reinforcements that show up and move in the same turn just kill me, especially in this mission, where they appear out of stairs whenever they can. I put my general up in front as a tank, which would be the sensible thing to do, but out came a swordmaster with an armor slayer blade and proceeded to kill him out of nowhere. That's just something you can't anticipate or react to, let alone base tactical adjustments on. And every time I play this mission, something in this vein happens. Sincerely, f***k this game. I think I'm going to give up on it, as I can't recall the last time a game has infuriated me like this.

Sorry for the venting. Not having a good time with video games today.

Michiel K wrote: ↑January 22nd, 2018, 10:33 pm Also, I had another stab at trying to finish Fire Emblem: Awakening. I've been playing Hard-Classic, which I should be able to handle with my experience with the series, but those reinforcements that show up and move in the same turn just kill me, especially in this mission, where they appear out of stairs whenever they can. I put my general up in front as a tank, which would be the sensible thing to do, but out came a swordmaster with an armor slayer blade and proceeded to kill him out of nowhere. That's just something you can't anticipate or react to, let alone base tactical adjustments on. And every time I play this mission, something in this vein happens. Sincerely, f***k this game. I think I'm going to give up on it, as I can't recall the last time a game has infuriated me like this.

Yeah that's fucking terrible, I had also started a new campaign on hard awhile back and that reinforcement shit(which was already really bad on normal) really put me off from continuing it.

Yeah, it's some old b.s.

Michiel K wrote: ↑January 22nd, 2018, 10:33 pm That's just something you can't anticipate or react to, let alone base tactical adjustments on. And every time I play this mission, something in this vein happens. Sincerely, f***k this game. I think I'm going to give up on it, as I can't recall the last time a game has infuriated me like this.

I was about to make another snarky anti-Awakening post, but let's be real for a second: It's not like Radiant Dawn for example isn't full of cheap little moments like these. Geoffrey's Charge is pure RNG, Dheginsea activating Ire just one-shots even your maxed-out units, fighting the Black Knight in 3-7 usually involves a reset or two, etc...

But it's funny how much worse it feels when the rest of the game is so "meh", isn't it?

That’s true, but in those situations the cards are on the table and you can sort of calculate in the possibility of an unlucky dice roll. When randomised reinforcements can come in and attack in the same turn, alll bets are off.