Coelacanth
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu
- Comment on New moderator for this community! 22 hours ago:
Make sure you play the Mankind Divided DLCs after! A Criminal Past in particular is probably the best “new Deus Ex” content they ever put out.
Also, congrats on being made a mod! I literally cannot think of a better person for the role.
- Comment on Virtual Boy: Nintendo Classics - Announcement Trailer 1 day ago:
If the recent pathetic patent filings were not enough to finally wake you up to what an awful company Nintendo are I don’t know what to tell you.
- Comment on Nintendo now has a US patent on summoning characters and making them battle for you | VGC 3 days ago:
Existing IPs, maybe. But the real point of this patent is to stifle innovation and preempt competition. No indie developer is going to dare enter this creative space anymore as they don’t have the resources to challenge Nintendo’s patent - even though I think this won’t hold up in court.
- Comment on Amid Palworld Lawsuit, Nintendo Patents a System for Summoning a Character 3 days ago:
Let’s hope so, because this sounds like it could be pretty disastrous doesn’t it? But who’s gonna afford challenging Nintendo?
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
I imagine a non-insignificant portion of Silksong players never played HK and just jumped on the hype bandwagon. Which makes sense considering it was built up like it would literally pay off your mortgage and reunite you with your high school sweetheart.
- Comment on have some standards 5 days ago:
What if I answer The Noid?
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
To be fair Ninja Gaiden Black* did also have boss runbacks. It’s one of a handful of small complaints I have about what is otherwise a very close to perfect game (Chapter 9 in the military base being one of the others).
But NG2 did have boss checkpoints, yes, and was much better for it. Even the notoriously player-challenging Itagaki realised after one game that boss runbacks sucked, and this was in 2008 - Demon Souls wasn’t even out.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
To each their own, I always think of difficulty and challenge as proportional and relative to the individual. You can just as easily turn the question around the other way: how can you feel any satisfaction beating a Souls game using magic and summons and level ups and items when there are people who have beat it at Level 1 hitless and using a dance pad instead of controller? What’s “appropriately challenging” is way too individual for the bluntness of a single difficulty setting.
And coming up with solutions isn’t even that hard. Add some sliders to adjust the length of parry windows and i-frames on dodge rolls and whatnot and you’re probably a good part of the way there. Gameplay intact, people still go through the same motions they just have a chance now even if they don’t have the reflexes or timing for frame-perfect inputs.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
Yes indeed, when arcade games were the norm devs specifically designed for absurd difficulty ramp ups and cheap deaths to finagle another quarter out of you.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.
- Comment on Massive Gaming Crossover: Among Us Teams Up with Popular RPG 5 days ago:
Damn they sold out huh.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
Not everything that makes the game harder or more challenging to play is good game design though, and a game shouldn’t get a free pass just because its developers stated “well the game being hard is part of our artistic vision”. It’s fine to criticise things, even - or actually maybe especially - things we like. We don’t have to be binary about things, we can like something while still recognising its flaws.
Excessive runbacks for example is something that is primarily concerned with disrespecting your time as a player and even FromSoft seem to have realised that they’re not a good addition or a fun way of increasing difficulty seeing as they introduced Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 days ago:
I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which people had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?
There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August September 7th 6 days ago:
I played Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time this week. Apparently Itagaki and some of the other ex-Team Ninja members who left after Ninja Gaiden 2 made it, so it felt like a natural next game after finishing the Ninja Gaiden trilogy.
I was very positively surprised by this game. Art direction is great, it has some very nice looking levels and apparently got both the original creator, some of the show writers as well as the original voice cast on board. Story isn’t going to pull up any trees but it felt appropriate for a cartoon and had some fun characters.
Gameplay definitely felt like it had Ninja Gaiden lineage, and felt pretty fun overall. Between the graphics and the ground pickups it felt a bit like a throwback to games of a bygone era. It’s a bit of a shame that many important combat abilities are gated behind the skill tree as it means the gameplay doesn’t make a great first impression, but it opens up and becomes a lot more fun as you start unlocking things.
Bosses were fun for the most part and felt appropriately balanced. Some fun designs and playing on Normal I didn’t need more than a couple attempts at most for each boss, which feels right for a game like this. Maybe the final boss’s vulnerability windows were a tad to small, but it was a cool boss otherwise.
Definitely recommend it if you’re interested in a more laid back and chill action game. Or if you’re a Samurai Jack fan, of course. Sadly I believe it’s been delisted from all storefronts but Epic, but you can of course always fly the black flag.
- Comment on Scary games. . ? 1 week ago:
I’m thirding Alien: Isolation, one of the best horror games ever made and a really loving tribute to the movies as well. On console they even had a feature where the alien listened in on you through the microphone and would hear if you made a noise. Not sure how it played out in practice as I didn’t play it on console but sounds rad.
The Outlast games are also frequently brought up as great horror games. I haven’t played them myself but have seen them played by others. Look pretty good, though a little more jumpscare heavy. Still atmospheric though.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 1 week ago:
Well, I was merely speaking in general, I didn’t actually buy Silksong! 😅 The combination of being prohibitively difficult and having tons of tricky platforming (I hate platforming) means I’m just doing like with Hollow Knight and staying away to save myself the frustration.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 1 week ago:
To each their own, but when I played through Blasphemous just recently it felt like the game had tons of design elements intended to either piss you off or deliberately waste your time or both.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 1 week ago:
The 2D sidescroller base that’s at the foundation of Metroidvanias is quite a bit older than that, though, so I think it’s fair to call it an older genre. Even though it is fairly evergreen.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 1 week ago:
Buying on GOG is always the play whenever the option is available.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 31st 1 week ago:
It’s a great console. I’m not buying any new Nintendo products but the 3DS was amazing and the N3DSXL just feels so nice in your hands.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
Admittedly it’s been a while since I played D:OS2, but I enjoyed that combat system quite a lot. No random success chance felt good, the action economy was more interesting and the skills had more freedom and interesting effects because they didn’t have to stick to existing 5E material. Magic/physical armor was an interesting strategic factor to play around and combat mostly felt good - although yes, it did frequently and infamously devolve into elemental surface spam.
Writing wise it’s all still in the patented Larian tone, which is sometimes funny but frequently unserious and sort of Marvel-esque for better or worse. I didn’t mind it as much in DOS2, but I was quite a few years younger when I played it. The romance sucked in that game too but at least one positive is I don’t remember every companion throwing themselves at you in a pathetic display of wish fulfillment protagonist-sexuality writing like they do in BG3.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
Clair Obscur does technically have an NG+, though I’d say it’s less of a focus than in Souls games. There is, however, quite a bit of foreshadowing and pieces of the story that you won’t understand on your first playthrough but that hits different the second time through. I personally opted to consume it by watching others play after I completed my own first playthrough, but I’d say there is grounds enough for a second playthrough if that’s important to you.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
I have a lot of issues with the writing of the game in general, Act 3 is also very bad. It’s still a great game, it’s just that people frequently claim it’s the best game of all time and I think that’s overrating it.
- Comment on Kazeta: the new Linux-based physical media OS (my article!) 1 week ago:
I love it! I don’t know why but game cartridges always had a much better feel to them than disks to me. Could just be nostalgia for the times, though. But I recently dug out my 3DS and there is just something so satisfying about the click of inserting a game.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
Yeah, BG3 isn’t a truly branching path game in the way something like Witcher 2 for example is.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
They’re very different games, in my opinion. If “bang for your buck” is most important then BG3 has objectively more content. It’s way longer, has way more side content and can support many playthroughs.
I think BG3 is a very good game, but it is not perfect and it is somewhat overrated. It’s a great game, but not the best game ever. It has a fair share of flaws, and while the writing is fine it’s still very much videogamey.
Expedition 33 is more of a work of art. It still has its problems too, but at all the critical points it delivers in spades. It’s got a great cast of characters, beautiful art direction and a story with resonant themes that will hit home with most people. Plus one of the best soundtracks of all time. It’s got fantastic presentation, some incredible set pieces and moments and phenomenal voice acting, direction and facial expressions. Even though the game is turn-based, the implementation of active elements like Parry and Dodge will feel very familiar to you coming from Elden Ring. In fact, one of the gameplay designers used to be a Sekiro speedrunner, and it shows.
From your frame of reference BG3 is more like Skyrim I’d say, in that it can almost be your “forever-game”. People put thousands of hours into it over dozens of playthroughs and it has a very vivid modding scene. Expedition 33 is all about that one, cinematic impactful playthrough. Maybe you play it a second time to pick up on foreshadowing and stuff like that.
For me personally I had a great time playing BG3, but I will eventually forget about it. I spent fewer hours in Expedition 33, but the experience will stay with me way longer.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 31st 1 week ago:
Thank you! I’ll bookmark that for the future.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 31st 1 week ago:
How hard is it to hack your 3DS? I haven’t done it and I haven’t really experimented with stuff like that for like 20 years. I feel like it could be a good idea to look into after Nintendo closed the eShop and second hand 3DS games are getting more and more expensive.
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 31st 1 week ago:
I’ve dug up my New3DS again and am ordering some games for it. Castlevania is somewhat of a gaming blind spot for me, is there one playable on the 3DS you’d recommend?
- Comment on Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of August 31st 1 week ago:
Still on the ninja grind, at this point I’m hopefully done with Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge relatively soon. Not yet, though.
I really wish this solid fundamental combat system wasn’t trapped inside a godawful game. I really truly hate everything the story and presentation is doing. The setting is shit, the narrative is shit, the QTE gameplay is shit. The levels are boring. The voice acting is bad, but not even in a fun and campy way anymore but just bad. And worst of all - unlike the previous games this attempts to be “story focused”. So instead of just getting a cutscene at the start and end of a chapter and then action in between you are non-stop engaging with the terrible garbage they’re serving.
And they even managed to fuck up executing the combat even though they have the most solid fundamentals in place of the entire series. I hate the Steel On Bone counters, and the combat is designed around spamming them all the time. It’s boring. QTE-ing a single SOB counter into multiple instant kills feels unearned, and so much less satisfying than deliberately delimbing enemies with specific combos in NG2 to set them up for instant execution.
Plus the bosses are actually even worse here. Some are okay, I know it’s infamous but the T-rex actually felt fine to me but stuff like the tank and helicopter bosses are just pure trash. I’ve also heard the final boss is a world record holder in unfair bullshit so you know, I have that to look forward to too, I guess.