4847 replies to this topic

[Cukeman]

Playing Super Mario Land 2. Man this game was so much larger in my memory. Still have a fond spot for it, but not the epic experience it was when I was a kid

[Dark Ice Dragon]

i decided to play again to  Guided Fate Paradox and to beat all the optional dungeon i never beat.

In the last days i beat the EX dungeon 1,2 but i was killed on the 1 floor of the EX 3... really hard.

So  i try a 100 floors dungeon for level up and gain good weapons, but i had to escape at floor 81 , the fact is that in this game you may run in a random optional boss anywhere and it almost killed me.. i did just in time to use the item that let you escape from dungeons.

But seem that my play was not useless, i got a lot of power ups and unlock another optional dungeon, more hard and long but i'm collecting great equipment here.

[Anthus]

Been playing Shantae And The Pirate's Curse on 3DS. It's a good game, even if it takes a while before you start amassing cool abilities. I actually, really, really like this game. You acquire different items that belong to another character, instead of getting animal transformations like in the first two games. The platforming is decent enough, but the combat can get a bit repetitive. I really love the sound track though, and overall, it's a solid game if you like platformers, and collecting stuff, and exploring. Some characters, scenes, and costumes borderline ecchi content, but the game is still well designed, even if it is a tad on the easy side.

 

Fun fact: The team that made Shovel Knight (Yacht Club Games) was made up of employees of WayForward, the makers of the Shantae series. 

[kurt91]

I love the Shantae games, but I really wish that the PC ports of Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse had some built-in shader options. They do not look good at all with that level of upscaling, but look beautiful on smaller screens like the 3DS has. I actually found an external shader setup for those games, and it looked absolutely beautiful, adding the illusion of additional detail between pixels, and some very faint scanlines to help break things up. It even imitated some of the types of effects that older games relied on. For instance, you know how Sonic the Hedgehog relied on the color bleeding on old-school televisions to get the transparency effect working on things like waterfalls? Add those types of effects to Pirate's Curse, and it looked amazing.

 

Anyways, I'm at the Void Quest portion of Persona 4. I'm trying to avoid looking at guides and spoiling the game for myself as much as possible, but I'm really tempted to do so anyways after seeing the request to fuse a particular Persona with a specific skill. I don't have a Vita, so I'm not playing Golden. I don't get to use the Skill Cards to help with that, and I can't ever remember what Persona combinations create what. I just go with whatever looks good and keeps me at the current required power level to proceed. I also wish that I could manually pick what skills are inherited. I'm always canceling and re-selection Fusions to get skills that I want to keep to carry over, and it would be a big help to not have to do that. It's not like it would break anything either since I'd get the same end result with less hassle in the process.

 

By the way, any advice on how to quickly get money? I'm always broke and equipment is getting really expensive. I'd farm money, but healing always costs as much, if not more than what I earn. I know that I can work on the Hermit Social Link to get discounts, but that takes a lot of in-game time. Right now, I'm revisiting the older dungeons to fill out all of the requests that I've accumulated, and hopefully score some Chest Keys that I can bring into the Void Quest dungeon for some free gear, so I don't have to spend as much at the shop.

[Cukeman]

On the last building in Luigi's Mansion:DM. Man that ice boss was a pain due to controls! The devs must agree since they don't make you do anything else in that mission. On another note I hate it when you get locked into a pattern where the moment you start vacuuming a ghost its friend appears to punch you in the back. Replayed some of the earlier levels looking for Boos I missed, I wonder if they don't appear until I do something later in the game?

[Fiyaball]

Got back from Japan on Thursday and bought about 25 games for $500 while I was there, here's some highlights:

Sega Saturn with Shining the Holy Ark, Shining Force 3 Scenario 1/3/Premium Disc(!)

Fire Emblem: Thracia 776/ The Binding Blade (both with case/manual, only copies they had)

Mother 1+2

Starfy 2/3

Tales of Rebirth/ Eternity

Tear Ring Saga/ Bearwick Saga

Shin Megami Tensei 1/2/if

Dragon Quest Heroes 1+2 for Switch

Wonder Project J2

[Anthus]

Forget what I said about Shantae and the Pirate's Curse being easy. I thought that till I got to the final area, and true final boss, cause hoo boy, to they want Shantae's blood, bad. The final level is a long, grueling gauntlet of really difficult platforming challenges making use of all of your abilities. From a design standpoint, it's cool cause you have to use everything you learned/ gained, but the difficulty is quite the spike up from anything else. At least dying is fairly forgiving. It only took me about a dozen tries, and only two or three true deaths, but damn. The final boss is also a huge leap in difficulty, and I admittedly can't do it without using any items. I liked this game so much though, that I'm considering buying it on Steam, or my Wii U. Dunno which version yet. Probably go with the Wii U so I have an excuse to touch that thing these days other than Zelda, and the occasional MK8 burst.

 

This is still one of the funniest things I've seen in a game. Maybe it's not really that funny, but it made me laugh out loud, which games don't often do. It might not make a ton of sense out of context, but, basically, these girls are soooo white, that their skin creates a beam which activates this solar trigger thing. They then... proceed to swim in a pool of Dragon spit. Just.. what kind of game am I really playing here? It's worth noting that I also got stuck here, cause I didn't slap the ham enough times to get the item it drops. Silly me, you ALWAYS slap the ham.

 

Screenshot of aforementioned scene

 

I've also been playing Ever Oasis, but.. eh, tbh, it's very meh to me. It has a lot of RPG tropes that I can't stand, including a patronizingly slow start, and you lose progress when you die. Like, this is 2017. Haven't we learned that losing progress isn't fun, or particularly good game design for the most part? That aside, it might get better, as I'm only about two hours in. I like the graphics, and the concept is pretty neat. It's like.. Animal Crossing meets.. Zelda? I guess?

[Nicholas Steel]

Which Shantae? If it is Pirate's Curse than I have nothing but severe anomalous frame pacing issues in the Steam version. Half Genie Hero works fine and dandy though.

[Anthus]

Yeah, I have Pirate's Curse on 3DS. And that's weird. But then again, Sonic Generations likes to give me shitty frame rates even though I can run higher-end games better. Dark Souls 2 for example, runs flawlessly, and (at least it seems like) it has more going on than Generations. Then again, Classic Sonic's model uses an insane amount of polys so who knows.

[Nicholas Steel]

Yeah, I have Pirate's Curse on 3DS. And that's weird. But then again, Sonic Generations likes to give me shitty frame rates even though I can run higher-end games better. Dark Souls 2 for example, runs flawlessly, and (at least it seems like) it has more going on than Generations. Then again, Classic Sonic's model uses an insane amount of polys so who knows.

Don't get confused between frame rates and frame pacing. Shantae: Pirates Curse runs at the intended frame rate, it is the presentation of the frames that is fucked up which creates the appearance of frame skipping/duplicating (It's vsync code is failing to detect vblank reliably).

 

It's annoying that they get it so right in the next game (Half Genie Hero) but don't bother to backport whatever they did in the new game to the old game (Pirate's Curse).

Edited by Nicholas Steel, 07 July 2017 - 11:13 PM.

[Anthus]

I know the difference, but I think since Pirate's Curse was made for the 3DS then ported to other stuff, it might not be optimized for some configurations for whatever reason. It might also try to use some weird interpolation or something to try to mask the 'low' resolution. I've noticed with screenshots of the Wii U/ PC version, it does that thing that irks me in games where they use some generic soft filter text over the crisp lower resolution sprite art, and it looks quite jarring.  It looks great on 3DS. Ports can be weird like that. Generations however, just flat out drops frames for me.

[Cukeman]

Just finished playing through Fusion again, man I love that story! I remember the first time playing it after Zero Mission it was such a frustrating experience being told where to go all time, rather than exploration that felt much less limited. And having a man-made environment made it much harder to identify possible hidden passages (you end up testing every random wall instead of suspicious looking natural formations). Had a much more enjoyable playthrough this time knowing what to expect. Man I really wish we'd get Metroid 5 because the story left off in such an awesome place. They better do that game right and have an amazing story continuation. Still, I have to admit that Metroid is a bit formulaic reusing Zebes, Ridley, Mother Brain, etc. I do think the X parasite and the Ing were both great new additions, and rival bounty hunters is also a great idea. I don't mind Metroids reappearing, just so long as they aren't always the whole focus. I do wonder why people got so anxious about getting more Metroid though, Nintendo just likes to take their time making these games, and usually they're fantastic. I mean it took from 1986 to 2002... 16 years to get Metroid 1-4 (and Prime 1). It's always been a long time getting new Metroid. It was never a prolific series like Mega Man where we had the original 6 games in just 7 years. I guess people just like Metroid so much they were really looking forward to more.

 

EDIT: I kinda feel like Metroid is the Wind Waker of the series, it strays from the formula, for storytelling reasons, and the story is great

Edited by Cukeman, 08 July 2017 - 10:05 PM.

[Cukeman]

Played some Sonic Advance. It's decent, except the change in physics is hard to get used to, it's harder to stop due to momentum and jumps are a lot slower- you kind of hang in the air, and when you're running, you're closer to the right edge of the screen than I'd like, making it harder to see upcoming obstacles. I've only used Knuckles so far. EDIT: And what's with floating in water on the surface, but sinking like a rock otherwise? What sense does that make?

 

Started playing Harvest Moon on GBC without reading a manual. It's a mix between addicting and tedious. If you know what you're doing there are a lot of helpful tools and shortcuts, if not, you'll end up wasting a lot of time and effort. I almost lost everything on my farm. I was doing great, bought some great new equipment and planted a ton of crops to get all that money back, then the next day spring changed to summer and there was an earthquake. I lost all my crops and didn't have enough money to buy anything. I was running low on food and all I had was one daily chicken egg. I got enough from egg sales to buy crops again and get into a financially okay situation, but now my fodder stores are in danger because the sprite is sharpening my scythe AND my hoe... it's a long wait to get them back...

 

Started playing Mega Man & Bass which I was excited for because I've never played it and we're not getting new Mega Man. I like that it looks like Mega Man 8, but I'm having Mega Man 7 issues - sprites are too large on the screen, making it clunky and hard to maneuver. This was originally on the Super Famicom, which had a larger screen, so this may be a port issue. I've had a lot of cheap deaths running into stuff just a tiny bit off screen, making this game more of a memorization chore.

EDIT: Never mind, this game is just a super troll, unfair hard.

Edited by Cukeman, 10 July 2017 - 06:15 AM.

[Ventus]

Mega Man and Bass is pretty hard to begin with, If you want to play a better version of it look for Rockman and Forte on SNES (way Superior version). I could never play the GBA version of it. But with the SNES version it was just overall better.

 

Anywho I've been playing Mega Man 8 over and over and over and over... I've been speed running it so far I learned some of the tricks like the ball jump and the quick kill on the intro crab boss.

If anyone want to see my latest run of the game https://www.youtube....h?v=DjfuGrc3iho<---there it is. I have a personal best of 1:22:18, I placed 25th on Speedrun .com

Next run I'll record will most likely be around sub 1:12 or sub 1:10... It really depends on my timing of tricks and me not dying like a scrub.

[Skipper]

I've been playing a lot of Fallout: New Vegas, lately. I have it modded with A Tale of Two Wastelands and a bunch of other mods, but I messed up and forgot to enable my merged patch before I started a new game - I was wondering why vendors weren't carrying as much junk and ammo types as they should have been carrying.