I finished all the content in 9 Kings. You get quite a few Armies/Kings to choose alongside perks to choose. In game you have a roguelike kingdom management with support and unit structures you can place a limited number of. You get to pick a new card each turn from a limited and random selection. After your building phase, you have an autobattler segment. Repeat this until you get a boss fight. The game also has buff tiles where empty build tiles reward you for building certain units there by a certain time, but most of the time this interferes with whatever layout I had in mind. Gameplay wise it is pretty addictive, and if you abuse the buff towers, you can make some obscenely overpowered units that have broken levels of stats and buffs. The Kings also declare war and peace with you as the game goes on so you can try to pinpoint what factions you want to play against or get buffs/structures/units from. Finishing a match doesn't take long, but the game lets you go into overtime once the boss is dead, although they admit it can be buggy and is not balanced yet. Clearing the overtime part even gives you a message wondering what broken strategy was abused to get that far which I thought was amusing abuse the Boars to make your units gods or libraries to stack absurd numbers of buffs on a single unit to make a near immortal knight squad for example. The autobattler part needs some work though as units will not collide with each other which means most of your army will bunch up and be extremely vulnerable to AoE attacks which is frustrating against some waves in the overtime segment. Speaking of the overtime segment, later waves can get way too laggy which is annoying. Some units and towers were a bit underwhelming in comparison, but a lot of them, even your HQ building can be buffed into some really dangerous things. Overall, it was alright. 7/10. Would probably bump it up to an 8 once it is done and gets a bit more polish. Hopefully the rest of early access goes well for them.

Played through The Alters, came away thinking it'll probably be my GOTY. It's a genre-defying sci-fi game that's difficult to describe, it's sort of a story driven resource management social sim base building game? It's not as complex or in-depth as you'd expect any of those games to be, nor is it trying to be. The main thing about The Alters is your ability to clone yourself, but from different versions of your life with different skillsets. Besides research you can do any job you want, but you'll never be the best at it, so you better get a botanist if you want to grow crops or a miner if you want a lot of metal. Have you ever heard of ludonarrative dissonance? The Alters is the opposite of that, all of the gameplay ties into the story. The clones aren't just peons, they're characters in their own right who can and do cause problems. The Worker was a union leader and is extremely anti-corporate, the Miner suffers substance abuse problems and begs for drugs, the Technician is just an asshole all around and you'll probably grow to hate him. That said, some Alters are less developed than others, I found the worst to be the Shrink. Has a neat backstory of suffering a mental breakdown after he lets his mother die, finding peace in some hippie group, becoming a therapist, and gradually turning into a mental health grifter, but none of that shows up in his story. And some Alters are significantly less useful than others, again the Shrink is guilty here. The game also forces you into always picking two Alters, the Technician and the Scientist, every playthrough. The game loses some of its earnest charm halfway through the second act and the level design in said act is an absolute chore. The game felt too easy, I was hitting bottlenecks left and right and always felt like I was outpacing the game, even on the highest difficulties. Towards the end I had nothing to do so I decided to see how many Space MacGuffins I could build, pic related. You can probably tell I'm struggling to write anything about it, it's a unique game and I'm finding myself either spoiling the whole thing or bitching about nitpicks. Go try it, it's different to anything else I've played. >>1612725 The ending of DE bugs me, I know some journos screech "the muted ending is intentional!!!" but I can't bring myself to agree. Not after the tribunal and the phasmid. I think they were trying to do the Fallout New Vegas thing but it's not reactive enough, the game can accuse you of things you didn't do like threatening suicide. They admit in-game it had a rough development with a lot of ideas cut, I'm sure had ZA/UM not fallen apart they would have done better in the sequel. >>1630281 I hated Xen in Black Mesa for three reasons >It looks like James Cameron's Avatar >It's way too goddamn long >It runs like shit And I absolutely agree the level design suddenly turned into Episode 1 for no reason, it even uses the same plugs from HL2.

I finished the main story of Skyrim the other night. Despite owning the game for a decade now, I've only just now actually gotten around to beating it. I don't think it needs any introduction at this point. Overall, I'd say it's simultaneously overrated and overhated somehow. I do genuinely appreciate the game's relative nonlinearity, on top of the game's design choice of putting in optional side areas en route to the main quest objectives. Outside of some iconic Bethesjank During the Elder Scroll vision, I had to reset the game because Alduin straight-up didn't show up the first time, causing the game to effectively softlock, I didn't really run into any major bugs. I didn't do super much past the main story, so there's no shortage of meat still left on the bone, and there was enough hook there where I'll probably mess around further. Also, getting the Animal Assist shout super early and using it to kill a giant with a mammoth was peak, and probably the highlight of my run. There were some pretty glaring issues I had, however. The vanilla UI was fairly annoying to navigate at times, and the puzzles were pretty lame as well, where they could simply be solved through brute force rather than actual thinking, having the solutions make absolutely zero sense Or maybe I'm just dumb, or some combination of the two. And the late part of the main quest in general was pretty lame. Both Alduin fights kinda sucked, and the ending was a massive wet fart. tl;dr I thought it was a good, but not great game. It was missing that "it" factor for me. 8/10. And through the entirety of my playthrough, I didn't have a single guard pull out the Arrow in the knee line, oddly enough

>>1612807 What's so good about it? I've been tepid about playing it for a while.

Just finished a Paper Mario randomizer. It was quite a hoot because I unlocked Bow early and got her ultra-ranked, so she was popping out 10 damage per turn to early game bosses. Though the funniest thing was that I forgot that the "shuffle bosses" feature was enabled, so here I spend a ton of resources trying to prepare for a boss, only for it to be switched to a completely different boss. Game definitely became broken after finding out that I could buy infinite Whacka bumps from several stores.

>>1631112 One good thing I'll say about Skyrim, is that a hell of a lot of attention to detail was put into the environment to help navigate the player through the world. Last time I played it, I ran a heavily modded Skyrim VR game with nearly all HUD elements either turned off or appropriately hidden. Had to navigate using a an actual paper map and compass that were attached to my belt and forearm respectively, and those subtle visual and audio cues really helped out a lot. Especially the rock piles with banners that marked the trail to caves and dungeons off the beaten path. Where it ends up falling flat, though, is that quest and dialogue designers EXPECTED you to use the quest marker by default, so those parts of the team never bothered to have NPCs give you accurate directions or differentiate quest item models from general clutter so there were a few points where I had to turn on the quest marker temporarily just to find some wandering NPC or generic short sword amid of pile of dropped NPC weapons or randomly placed in an area without much thought to how such an item would have been treated. The single biggest improvement that Bethesda could make for TESVI, aside from reversing the streamlining of character development into "jack-of-all-trades, master of all" slop, is to design the game as if there were no worldmap, quicktravel, quest markers, or any of that other shit. Once the game is done, THEN add all that shit back in as QoL for the inattentive and the stupids.

After a few weeks of playing, I've finally "finished" DK Bananza. I haven't done any of the post game content, and I need to clear out the bananas in the latter half of the game, but I had a really fun time. Honestly my favorite part was simply getting to finish the game without ever getting the Zebra Bananza power-up. The game even acknowledges it in the post credits, so it seems like the devs expected people to complete the game without going through each zone. The finale is of course great, but overall the game definitely lacks difficulty. Hopefully there's post-game content similar to the moon with Mario Odyssey that's at least a bit more difficult. Would post my own screenshots, but my system needs an update

>>1670571 Following up on this since I have finished the main post-game content areas. Its unfortunately not very fun.

>>790791 The last game I finished was Mad Max for PC. It was alright. It came out in 2015 so I didn't have any expectations of it being ground breaking, especially with the open world tag. However the game turned out to be pretty fun overall. Customizing your car felt good and earning more passive income from taking out camps felt rewarding. The combat was quite easy with parries being very forgiving and healing from kills in Rage mode, but they did a good job with the various executions and making you feel like every punch had impact. Where the game faltered I feel was bloat, especially once you max out one allied fortress and get all the bonuses, taking out the rest of the random events on the map felt like a waste of time since even on hard mode I was barely taking damage or using my shotgun that often, but even if I did I could immediately fast travel to the completed fort and refill on everything right away. The story was average action. Nothing really to write home about, but I did enjoy the ending sequence where Chumbucket betrays you and steals the Magnum Opus and then Max just runs him the fuck over trying to push Scrotus off the cliff like holy fuck no mercy I would give it a 7/10 considering I paid $5 for it, got about 30 hours out of it and most of it was enjoyable, even though I rushed the story toward the end. 8/10 if I played it back in 2015 probably.

>>1631112 >That last spoiler. Not that surprising if you leveled your skills fast enough or did a few quests. The skill-based unique guard dialogue is far easier to trigger in Skyrim than it should be, activating at level 30. Grabbing enough skill books and always doing some alchemy, enchanting, and smithing for more gold will get you plenty of them.

Spent the last couple weeks playing through Arx: Fatalis thanks to the discussion in a recent thread. If you're interesting in giving it a try, I highly recommend playing it through the open source version titled Arx: Libertatis. The game is great if you're into immersive sims, it plays very similarly to Thief and Deus Ex. You play as a stranger with amnesia who finds himself stuck in the world of Arx, an underground fortress inhabited by several extant races, making due with the subterranean life they subsist in against the harsh outer, cold, dead surface world. Rather quickly you become embroiled in the goings on between them, and before long make yourself known as a champion against the coming dangers of a hidden cult worshiping a slighted, envious god. Literally just finished it a few moments ago, and wanted to share some of my thoughts: It's very fun. I played it a few years back and didn't finish it then, but having given it another go I really do appreciate the roundabout design a lot of the levels have and how much thought really had to have been put into their design. Plus, there's quite a lot you can miss on your first playthrough so giving it a second go around really opens your eyes up to how many options really were available initially. The game came out around the same time as some of the later King's Field games and may have taken inspiration from them; the game world itself is built shockingly similar to a Dark Souls title in design. It's essentially one giant cave system, with the surviving kingdoms spread out over several floors of it after the sun died and the surface world froze over: Humans and Goblins live near the surface levels, Snake Women and Rat Men live in the deeper levels, the Dwarves live in the deepest since the previous floors were part of the mine they had previously excavated. Sometimes you'll be sent back through a previously explored area, often to talk to a specific character or return to a place you couldn't originally access. But you'll also inevitably discover shortcuts from the fifth floor up the fourth, or the second to the third, and so on in ways that make sense diagetically. Including a warp system linked to each floor unlocked about halfway through the game. Praise: -There is a lot of interactivity for what really only tries to be a decent RPG. The goal of the game is combat and exploration, but it also provides the ability to fish, combine ingredients to make better foods, cook things by placing them in front of fires, experiment with the runes you have to discover new spells, and interacting with objects and actors in the environment (even if it's just clicking on a spit over a fire to make it spin or a chicken to make it cluck). btw, you can click on a chicken ten times to make it explode into a cooked chicken. -For being restricted to such a limited environment, there's an appreciable variety of enemies to actually come across. You've got rats, spiders, goblins, trolls, and zombies, but also liches, mummies, demons, cultists, Ylsides (cult warriors), snake women, golems, rat men, and even an optional dragon to fight. -The game repects the player's own agency pretty well, especially for a lot of the earlier areas. If you don't want to waste time talking to the trolls or goblins, you can just kill them and take what you need from them. The same can be said for numerous figures in the game, though it does make achieving some goals significantly more difficult. Additionally, some quests can be completed in the same vein by just killing someone or stealing something instead of bargaining or working for it like stealing Krahoz from the rebel camp, completely skipping the crpyts as an area and missing out on like 1/3 of the game. -The game also respects the player's time to a good degree. If there's a mechanic that needs a pickaxe or a puzzle that needs a fireball or levitation spell, chances are you'll find one of those lying around relatively close. Plus, there's a spell explicitly for making you run around the map faster. -Spoilers: The main character isn't actually a human, but the avatar of a Guardian sent from another world. This gets revealed relatively early in the game, but that fact really helps to sell the voice actor's slightly stitled, awkward performance. He's not really human, or used to his body, he's just mouthing out the words that he knows through intuition as a mystic being make sense. -There are some very nice looking environments in the game, which again I didn't really experience fully on my first playthrough. Swampy cavers, dusty crypts, spider dens, stony temples... fleshy cult dens, icy caverns, molten remains of deserted workshops. For taking place in one singular cave system, it's impressive how much variety the game designers packed into the world. Gripes: -The game is still very janky despite being incredibly well-designed and detailed. Several mechanics (platforming, combining items, placing items, casting spells) are difficult to get the hang of and can sometimes just outright not work even if you appear to be doing the right thing. The crypt puzzle especially was very frustrating to solve, despite my initial suspicion being correct. Firstly, there's a chasm of lava you don't find any way to cross. You just jump/levitate over it or tank the damage. Then in the actual puzzle's room, you don't have to match the inner symbols with the moon phase they belong to, but instead the outer symbol closer to an "arrow" that blends in with the platform's design. Placing the stones with those symbols also made me wonder if I was doing something wrong, since setting them down on top of each pillar left them floating noticeably off of them like it wasn't intended. --Several mechanics don't work exactly the way you'd think, notably a lot of the spells. Casting heal heals you and any nearby enemies. Levitation doesn't let you fly freely, just hover horizontally across the map. A lot of status-boosting spells, like bless and speed don't give you a flat bonus for X seconds, but instead are constant effect spells that drain your mana indefinitely until you run out. --(This could a plus depending on your opinion but) Very little is actually spelled out directly to the player, both in terms of mechanics and objectives. That works pretty well when you're thrown into a goblin kingdom and have to figure out how to finagle your way around to come out on top and with their king's good graces, but not so much when you're explicitly told to talk to someone or do something, but to accomplish that you have to use a specific item on a person or interact with one specific thing in the environment to get the proper response. It doesn't help that sometimes events just immediately happen and drag you into a cutscene instead. -There are several points in the game where you hit a pretty massive difficulty spike, the most notable being when you run into Ylsides for the first time, either in the temple or back in Arx. If you try to fight them like any other enemy (approach, bait out attack, counterattack) you're going to get your ass reamed. They almost necessarily require magic, either through damaging spells or through buffing yourself and casting debuffs on them to actually overcome since they have an immediate attack and movement speed buff they cast that lets them stunlock and devastate your health if you're not paying attention. -(Relevant to last point) If you don't invest in magic, you're basically handicapping yourself. Several points in the game require you to use magic to achieve something, and while there are scrolls that can accomplish those goals they're limited and can be wasted. There's also no reason not to invest in magic, since it's necessary but also beneficial to any play style. Buffs, heals, offensive spells, defensive spells, stealth spells like invisibility, utiliy spells like setting traps or dispelling magic fields, etc. -Inventory management is on a grid-based system, which is fine in theory. But the fact the tiles are so small and some items don't line up perfectly with the grid makes management frustrating and being able to only move one item at a time, even from stacks, especially tedious. -There are several spells that are not automatically revealed once you hit the skill level and runes necessary to cast. Which is really cool, it encourages experimentation. But even once you cast those, they stay unrevealed. That's to say even the simplest of hidden spells can't be referenced unless you manually write down what they are. It's cool that there are hidden spells, but it would be nice if they got written down in the spellbook like all of the other spells once you discovered them. -The ending is really sudden. You manage to kill Iserbius and then the lizard guy from the Noden shows up and goes "Yeah, good job, now go back home." and then a little static image cutscene plays showing the frozen planet. They went through the trouble of making a whole 3D model with rigging for the guy and he shows up for like 5 seconds. --It makes sense a lot of the story is left in the background, since your main goal is just to kill Iserbius and stop Akbaa from incarnating, but a ton of the story near the back end is really rushed all of a sudden in general. You solve the queen's murder, then in a single cutscene find out the rebel chick does want to meet her father, meets him, nearly gets abducted by the snake bitches due to an old forgotten treaty, they all get interrupted by the queen's ghost who reveals Alia was just the younger one of a pair of twins, you get shown like five (!) unique cutscene painting, then the snake ladies disappear from the game forever and also there's a rat there for some fucking reason. A lot of the custscenes and unique interactions happen in the later half of the game, and really make the first half feel a little more lackluster because of it. Arx Fatalis is a very fun game. It's also a bit rough around the edges, but that helps make it unique. A lot of the game feels almost half-finished, like the devs were on borrowed time, but it's easy to see how quickly the features included could have spiraled out of control and makes it easier to appreciate what was achieved in the end. I really love the world building and general design, but the fact so little of it is substantially fleshed out makes it feel all the more mysterious. Arx is exactly the kind of game you might see getting remastered as a cult classic, which is a shame since its existence as such an obscure title lends so much more to the atmosphere it carries. So much about it makes it feel like a game from another timeline, like a studio's passion project that almost never got released. Also as a very minor aside, there are so few good screenshots of this game online, the ones you get from Google or whatever don't do the game justice at all, they're all in the native 640x480 and look like shit. Almost makes me want to go through and take some nice pictures of every unique location in the game for archival purposes.

>>1759426 Also, I realized I could hide the minimap with the R key but didn't want to go back to each of those levels and take another screenshot because I'm lazy. Also also I'm not sure if stealing Krahoz or aggroing the rebels changes anything, but a quick search says that certain actions like that do alter some cutscenes and quest outcomes in the game, which is pretty cool.

I recently marathoned Banjo-Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing, Conker's Pocket Tales, Donkey Kong 64, Banjo-Tooie, Conker's Bad Fur Day, and Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge. I had 100%ed Banjo 1, DKR, and both Conker games before, but it had been many years. And I played DK64 and Banjo-Tooie a lot when they were new, but never had the patience to beat them. They're all good games, but honestly they do become a bit of a slog. >Banjo 1 Annoying due to needing to get all the Notes in one go, which was clearly a technical limitation of how they programmed the game, since all later games (and the Xbox versions of Banjo) didn't have this quirk. >DK64 Like everyone says, it does have an annoying number of collectables, but I don't think it's as bad as everyone says. I do think the water level goes a bit too far with it though. >Banjo-Tooie Fewer collectables and is a shorter game but I still found it slightly annoying in some sections. I think DK64 and Tooie would both have benefit from more smaller levels, perhaps. I think the issue is that you spend too much time in each level. In Tooie it's only like half as bad, but it's still an issue. Give me twice as many levels that are each half as long. But I guess the point of this sort of game is that you only build one level and then just dump a thousand collectables in it so players spend forever with the level you made. Oh yeah, the shooting controls also bugged me. I hate that C-buttons strafe instead of aim, and aiming is vertically inverted, and you can't change either of these things, as far as I know. These people made Goldeneye years earlier, so you'd think they'd give you a few options in these regards. >Conker's Pocket Tales A simple little Game Boy Color game that deserves more credit. It's a fun adventure that honestly does evoke the more famous N64 game a little bit as far as gameplay goes. Both of them aren't collectathons, but adventure games. This one is maybe a bit too simple, but for a Game Boy Color game it's pretty good. Also at one point I switched the emulator to Game Boy (not Color) mode and it had way bigger changes than just color being turned off. Many sprites were very different, and I think I even noticed slight differences in level design. But I switched back to Color mode because I figure that's how it's meant to be played. But I should go back and play the non-Color version some time just to check it out. >Conker's Bad Fur Day An absolute technical marvel that blew me away when it came out. Sure, voice acting wasn't impressive by 2001, but it was on the N64. Even though I mostly played PlayStation, I was still impressed that they pulled it off on that hardware. And yeah the humor was a big draw. And I know, both of these things are passe and even frowned upon in some circles now, but I am playng these games to go back to the past, and I appreciate what the game did in 2001. However, I do find that by removing practically all the collectables, you're left with a game that is really just going from setpiece to setpiece. There are light puzzles, but I wouldn't say they're very fulfilling. The combat isn't exactly stellar. Also the shooting controls still suck. When the spectacle wears off, the gameplay isn't the greatest. I still definitely had a fun time overall though. >Grunty's Revenge Very underrated game. Too easy and too short, but honestly I like the level lengths here. Each level makes an impression but doesn't overstay its welcome. The issue is just that there's too few of them. But I suppose it's a GBA game so it's almost expected. That said, the Spyro GBA games are very comparable, and much longer. Spyro 2 and 3 on GBA might be of comparable quality, as well (they're pretty good, but the first one has some problems). Anyway, Grunty's Revenge does a great job at feeling like a legitimate Banjo game. The isometric view does lead to a couple of bullshit jumps here and there, but overall it works very well. It deserves to be remembered as part of the series more often. >Diddy Kong Racing It's a different genre but my autism made me include it anyway. I think it's a big improvement over Mario Kart 64, but Crash Team Racing improved upon DKR much further. Compared to that, the driving is too simplistic. That said, the hub world is a lot of fun to explore, and the hovercrafts and flying do add a lot of fun variety. Later kart racers improved it further, but those vehicles and the hubworld add enough to keep this game novel even in the face of later gameplay improvements. Now I have to play Banjo Pilot, and then I'll probably go back and play Star Fox Adventures. But I've never actually managed to beat Star Fox or Star Fox 64 on the hardest paths, and my autism won't let me just skip them. I found it easier to skip Adventures, even though really from what I can tell it should be in my Rare marathon. I'll get to it eventually.

I've just beaten SH2 (PS2 emulation), and I have to say that it's pretty overrated. 6-7/10 at best. I can see now that it was essentially the last of us of its day. But, I do think the game was very creepy in the first half when you're going through the apartments and hospital. Once you get to the historical society, it's not as scary anymore though because you are already used to it by then. But, I do feel like the 2nd half of the game isn't as polished as the first half anyways so there's that too. And the gameplay isn't anything to write home about. Even the weakest of the RE titles clears it with ease. Plus, I didn't like how the endings were picked. Made me feel like I didn't have any agency over how I wanted it to end. Maybe the remake improves on that aspect, I'll have to see. But I will say that the ending i got (in water) made for a pretty sad conclusion to James' story. Hearing Mary cry about how she just wanted James to live for himself while the text is scrolling over a dead empty background was tragic. It did make me feel something which is something most other games can't do. Also, the music is good too but that's an obvious plus considering that's partly why silent hill blew up in the first place. I'm gonna play silent hill f soon and see how that compares. I don't care for other people's opinions especially when it's just regurgitating what others have said when they haven't played the games. I'm glad that I atleast finished a SH game now. There's a bad trend of fans who have never even consumed the product in the first place.

I finally played Sonic Unleashed (recompiled pc version), it was honestly a great game and the werehog sections weren't that bad once you get a decent moveset The speed stages are also between great to amazing And Eggmanland is one of the greatest final levels I've played but I never want experience it ever again as weird as it sounds

>>1811849 Was the final section tedious or annoying in such a way where its fine for a final segment, but not something you'd want outside of that instance?

Cute little game, you play as this dragon collecting eggs. Not a fan of the baby sounds it makes, but it's fairly good, there's even a part where it gets real spooky just like I got with Creepy Castle or Angry Aztec at certain segments of DK64

Just finished the first god of war (on hard) since I never touched these games before. I'd give it a 6/10 Decent beat'em up that suffer from a lot of jank, bloat, and a lack of enemy variety. >Some enemy attacks just aren't synced to their animations properly and hit earlier than they should, which make those extremely irritating to fight. >Some of them also get random super armour and go through your attacks even though they should be getting juggled >Some also get counters through your hits that come out in about 0.2 second and feel extremely cheap >Some enemies like the medusa also dodge attacks at an annoyingly high rate, which make fighting them early on extremely tedious. >The final archers with their shotgun explosive arrows can honestly go suck a fat one. <Lots of combos and way to juggle enemies. I appreciate that you can even juggle the heavy ones. Powers are nicely balanced other than the Medusa one. That shit make a mockery of a lot of things for almost free/ Only 3 bosses is weirdly low. Hydra felt mega tedious with the knockback, minotaur was a bit of a bitch because of hitbox issues but a fun fight and the final boss is cool spectacles but also take half your hp in a single hit The family protection flashback is complete RNG at this difficulty and I can only expect god mode to be worse. It completely soured the ending part for me. OST is good but also waaaaaaaaaay too repetitive. You'll hear the one buldup so many times by the end that it honestly get exhausting to listen to Checkpoints are too generous so the pacing is fine and character development is a-ok, if a bit basic. How he came to be white is some fucked up shit I'd never come back from myself. Curious to see how much better the sequel will be. Also imagine being born bald lol

>>1823553 The sequel is much better from what I remember. They addressed the more annoying aspects about the combat and gave Kratos a cooler arsenal to play around with.

>>1823553 The fight against the Kratos clones can actually be done fairly consistently, even on very hard mode. It just requires a smart plan, and figuring out what the game doesn't out right tell you. Mainly when things start getting really chaotic, and hard to manage you use the Army of Hades magic, and it'll clear out a ton of enemies. Using Rage of the Gods gives you unlimited magic for as long as it lasts, so you can pop that to let you use Army of Hades more, and when you hug your Family to heal them, that actually refills your Rage of the God meter very fast, to then get another usage of unlimited magic. So you'll have the full bar of magic you go into the fight with, as well as the Magic from using Rage of the Gods, and healing your family gets you a 2nd Rage of the Gods, so you have a quite a bit of Magic to work with to make the fight easier.

>>1824548 Excuse me nigger what do you mean the hug refill your fucking boost power I was keeping this free magic until the end for NO reason?? I had to fucking keep stunlocking those clones in a specific pattern when I could have had another free fucking wife heal? AREEEEEEEEEES

Finally 100%'d Ember Knights including the Wrath of the Architect DLC on the Switch. First I downloaded it just to play it with my nephew but ended playing it all by myself. Interestingly, nothing about this game is original, rogue-lite with nexus where you unlock upgrades, relics, skills and try to get further and further very alike Hades, but somehow it makes everything more comfier. Game has up to 4 player coops and a fuckload of multipliers that can make runs different. I first downloaded the 1.0 version and kept getitng newer and newer, some already existing relics became rare and I had to adapt. Later a boss rush and daily dungeon mode were released

>Mages and Monsters 2. Auto battler where you can spend money to upgrade and grow your hero, magic attacks, and soldiers. Lots of shit to mess with which is nice, but also has the issue that a lot of these games do which is that if you want to finish a full game, you need to know what you are going for from the start. Kind of annoying when it takes a bit of time to reach the final levels and you get fucked because you were experimenting with shit. Also lacking the usual passive upgrade trees that persist between rounds which slightly kills the replay value if you need something to grind for. Unit pathing and target priority is mildly annoying as well at times although at least you can take advantage of it too. I'm being overly negative so far though as the game still gave me a decent amount of fun especially when you find something that really makes you feel overpowered. If anyone tries it and you are struggling, then consider using the tier 1 swordsman with his damage buff every 2nd swing upgrade paired with attack speed which makes them hilariously broken if you also make them tanky or use a hero that heals or buffs them even more. Watching those guys 1 shot or just quickly raping high HP bosses and monsters is great.

>>1830573 It's not original at all but it's well executed. And the plot being some actual Saturday cartoon hero/villain with the big bad always taunting you is refreshing in this day and age. Main gripes with it is that the bow is a busted piece of shit that scale so much better than everything else and that there's not enough worlds. Even with the DLC doubling the amount, it still would have been nice to get like another 4. Game is also unbalanced as fuck but that's part of the appeal, me think.

Finished Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy on Switch. I had only beaten the games until AA4 before when the DS emulator was before 1.0. Aside the games it has a gallery mode where you can see a lot of designs and animations plus a music player. Just wish they would be locked to avoid spoilers. I thought SoJ would be the main even but I liked DD more, it felt that everyone had a stake on it. Poor 'thena only got half a case in SoJ.And Poor Juniper got taken to the same upstate farm that Iris did after DD

>>790791 I just finished Still Wakes The Deep. Pretty meh. I refunded it after it had a based commie and evil nationalist. Despite the refund I went on offline mode and completed it. Too walking sim movie like and the story wasnt gripping. The monsters were basic, just fleshy blobs. Wouldn't recommend.

Sekiro: Shadows die twice (PS4) This concludes my From Software journey for now. I had played the Dark Souls Trilogy and Bloodborne before, which only leaves Demon's Souls and Elden Ring, but I won't be playing those anytime soon. Anyway, about Sekiro. Some people would argue that Sekiro is not really a Souls game, and I can definitely see where they are coming from. It definitely does have a lot in common with Souls, but then it also is very different from Souls. The combat is much more aggressive, you don't create your own character, there is an actual story, there are no invasions, you can pause the game, and the RPG mechanics are much less. It's at a point where just because you like or don't like Souls it does not mean that you will or will not like Sekiro. But personally I still consider it a Souls game, at least in spirit. This is the first of the Souls games that I actually found hard. With Dark Souls you can beat any enemy simply by hitting him more than he hits you. In Sekiro not so much. You want to get hit so you can deflect and you must keep up the pressure or else the enemy's posture will recover. Reducing the enemy's health does help, but it is rarely the way to actually defeat him. On my first playthrough I made it about halfway through the game before it became too hard for me and I had to take a couple of months off before I started it all over again. Part of the difficulty is also how much there is to the controls. You can dodge, but you can also jump, mikiri-counter, use a combat art, use a tool, swing with the rope, and of course combine all of these moves together. This is the game that took me the longest to get used to the controls. However, once I got over the initial hurdle I was rewarded with a truly unique experience. The fact that you can't just chip away at bosses made victory so much more rewarding. Stealth, swinging, running and jumping blend together so perfectly that the game is very dynamic, there is no downtime, no going through the motions. I was amazed at how quickly I was covering ground on my second attempt. In Dark Souls no matter how good you are at the game, you cannot just zip through the level, you are bound by walking speed and the ground. The lack of RPG mechanics and build autism was a welcome change. There is still freedom to develop my character by picking different skills, but it's much more streamlined than what the Souls games have. Stealth and action blend in seamlessly, this is not one of those games where you have to pick one over the other. Oh, and you can actually pause in this game! Yes, who would have thought that I would get excited about being able to pause a game in 2025. All in all, I would definitely recommend people who like tough games to try it, even if they might not have liked Dark Souls. And if you did like Dark Souls be aware that this is quite a different game. All the lessons from Dark Souls (dodge rolling, patience, chipping away at the enemy) are actually counter-productive here.

>>1858889 I should also mention that I was playing with the 60FPS patch on my hacked PS4. I could not imagine playing a game this fast-paced in 30FPS. What the actual fuck, From Software? Why is 30FPS ever considered acceptable?

>>1858900 Does the game actually achieve 60fps ? Are you playing on a PS4 pro ?

>>1858919 I had the FPS display turned off, so I don't know the exact number. I don't think it can reach 60FPS on my non-pro PS4, more like 50, but even 50 or 40 is still better than 30. I would guess that the PS4 would perform better. Sometimes I play with the idea of selling my PS4 Slim and buying a PS4 Pro; with Bloodborne, Sekiro and Dark Souls 3 I would have three games that would profit from the upgrade. But then I look at the price and it's not really worth it. I found this YouTube video that does an FPS comparison between unpatched and patched game on a regular PS4: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=d8VtX2635-Q

>>1837718 What pissed me off was when the one female character at the end basically said the MC was a coward and spoke down to him. This guy has gone through hell and didn't run away from trying to fix the problem once, but I guess the devs needed their strong empowered woman moment even though it made no sense.

>>1858889 >Some people would argue that Sekiro is not really a Souls game, and I can definitely see where they are coming from. It definitely does have a lot in common with Souls, but then it also is very different from Souls. Personally I consider it a Souls-lite, as opposed to a Soul-like, and the same way there are criteria to determine if something is Rogue like or lite, I can give you a list of criteria for what I think something needs in order to be Souls-like.

>>1858919 I have now turned the FPS display on and my results are pretty much the same as in that video: around 50FPS for the most part with some drops on occasion if there is a lot going on. Still better than always 30FPS. I don't understand why some people think having a consistently low framerate is better than having a higher one that occasionally drops. >>1869420 >I can give you a list of criteria for what I think something needs in order to be Souls-like. Please don't, there is enough -like VS -lite autism on the internet. I agree that it's not really like Dark Souls, but there are clear elements of Dark Souls in it. I don't really care how people want to categorize it. If someone wants to say that Sekiro is not really a Souls game I won't argue with that.

>>1858889 Sekiro: Shadows die twice (PS4) Yes, again, this time on New Game Plus. I don't know what it is about this game but I just cannot get enough. It hasn't even been a month since I beat it and I thought I had enough for the time being. After beating the final boss the second I thought I'd just make it to the next save point, only to be already at the first boss. I might actually end up Platinuming this game just by virtue of how much I am playing it, and I have never cared about achievements before. Please send help.

>>1858889 >>1915279 I need to replay it. I still need to experiment with some different prosthetics and skills than I did with my 2 1/5 playthroughs. I also need to try out the "DLC" stuff. What did you use? Skills/prosthetics I mean.

>>1915716 >What did you use? Skills/prosthetics I mean. I was mostly relying on the sword and deflects and dodges, with prosthetic tools and skills only for specific enemies and bosses. Primarily because in the heat of combat I would forget about those.