I'd definitely get it if it wasn't $60 right now. It looks worth $30-$40, but definitely not $60.

You can hire any pawns from your friend list for free. I've sent you a request. I also have an alt PSN, I'll send you a request later on too.

Been playing Diablo 3 lately. It was 20 bucks (finally!) and the damned expansion pack got my blood pumping. Definitely gonna pick that beast up soon. The game is a lot better than I remember it being, back during the beta.

And on another note-- Deus Ex: The Fall is about to drop!

Which reminds me... I really need to go back to beat Human Revolution. I really loved that game.

its a great game, not the best but the gameplay is generally a lot of fun

I did and beat him once. The way I did it was to keep the S power up all the way until the final boss. It's the one where you do a spinning blade jump. It OHKOs some bosses. You might take a hit or so because you're jumping into the boss doing that move but it does a lot of damage on any boss.

So basically don't lose that power up all the way until the last boss and get to the last boss with enough health so you can jump into him with that move and you can beat it.

Beat it once and never again. Just like Mike Tyson's Punch Out.


Been playing Dark Souls 2 and doing the sidequests in Fire Emblem Awakening. Dark Souls has its own topic so I'll mention Fire Emblem Awakening. You have to build up characters' relationships so they get married and have kids which spawn Paralogues (sidequests). And considering the sheer amount of characters and possible pairings, that's quite a bit of sidequests.

It's maddening how much content there is in a portable game. Beating Fire Emblem should be 30 - 40 hours and 50 - 100 hours to be a completionist, which is what I'm working on. Not to mention replaying on different difficulties and a different main character. And if you get DLC I can't imagine how much game there is then.

Fire Emblem and Monster Hunter are probably the only 2 games I can think of where grinding is fun. Probably cause grinding retains the difficulty and fun of a normal playthrough.

Miriel's my favorite character. She's so awesomely scientific.



A big tip for someone playing Fire Emblem on classic difficulty (characters die for good) is to never ever let Donnel die. Ever! He starts off weak but eventually becomes overpowered. I purposely leveled up Miriel to do insane magic damage and to have high defense to take hits and she's one of the few who is in Donnel's league.

Another big tip is to never let someone overpowered do all the work and take experience other characters need. So you want overpowered characters only for the hard parts. Otherwise, let other people fight because experience isn't evenly distributed.

In short, sometimes you don't realize how fun a game is until you replay it or be more thorough with it.

So, Bundle Stars has a discount bundle that includes Knytt Underground and 4 games I don't care about, for 1.79€. So sold.
Anyone open for a pacifist metrodvania-like that's all about exploration and atmosphere should consider getting this. A demo and the two completely free predecessors can be downloaded from the dev's website. http://nifflas.ni2.se/

http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/ ... nd-bundle/

I have that for Wii U. Fuck knows when I'll actually play it.

Fire Emblem is awesome. I had Miriel and Kellam paired up. They are pretty impressive when joined on the battlefield. And Donnel is ridiculous when you put the time into him. My biggest tip is to not rely on Frederick too much. Early on, he's very powerful, but quickly becomes outclassed the more time you play. It's better to use your others characters and not waste exp.

Huh, I didn't think to try that. I'll keep that in mind whenever I play it again!

As for Mike Tyson, I salute your achievement. There is surely a place of honour in Valhalla reserved for those who can attain such a glorious victory.

I am shitting myself over Ground Zeroes. The fucking cliffhanger and the thought that I have to wait about an entire fucking year for The Phantom Pain is eating me alive.

Yeah, I took the bait and got Ground Zeroes for PS4. Pretty disappointed that pretty much all the story stuff was already seen in the trailers. I have a theory that Konami pushed the game out because they're in poverty mode like Capcom right now and they wanted to get something out to help fund MGSV:TPP.

Still a fun game though. Basically a glimpse of what Peace Walker could've been if it was developed for consoles. Game is freaking hard too, especially on hard difficulty. The enemy patrol tagging and reflex mode don't make that much easier.

I took Kai out for a ride just now. As I suspected, he is too powerful -_- He was killing chimeras pretty much by himself in a matter of seconds.

I'm also among those who picked up Ground Zeroes on PS4. I finished it on Normal in 84 minutes with 9% completion, but holy crap, it was a hell of a ride. I'm really pleased with some of the improvements and changes they've made to the gameplay.

Don't take my tip as some easy way to do it. It's still hard as hell. Just don't wanna get your hopes up It requires memorization as you don't want to accidentally slash something and get a different power up when you only wanted to get more ninja magic. Hitting attack while jumping is something you're going to do all the time so you'll be using it up and need to replenish your magic. A game over is going to cause you to lose that power up which doesn't become available at later levels. It's not like you can get that power up right before the final boss.

So it sort of makes it possible, but not easy. What does make it easy is getting it on the 3DS and just abusing save states. Doing that I beat the final boss without getting hit once using no special attacks. Just the sword.

And thanks. I do remember for Punch out was Tyson obviously blinks before doing his OHKO punches. So you need reactions for that. If not, then you're screwed. The worst is when he doesn't telegraph his OHKO punches. For that I do remember looking at the clock and memorizing the times he would do them. Provided everything else went along smoothly, that technique worked for me. But still, you need god awfully good reactions and can't mess up once.



I lost Kellam, which sucks. I don't remember if I failed to recruit him or if he died on Classic mode and I just couldn't be bothered to soft reset it. I just know he's not in my roster, but most everyone else is.

My heavy hitters are Donnel (Hero), Stahl (Paladin), Miriel (Sage), my main character (Grandmaster), and Kjelle (General).

For taking hits, Kjelle is just unbeatable. A sentinel who can stand there and take any kind of abuse and lose just 2 HP at the absolute worst. I don't know all the possible ways she can unlock but she's Sully and Chrom's kid in my game.

Donnel is an all around monster that takes and deals damage.

Stahl does good physical damage and can take a beating.

Miriel like Stahl but with magic damage.

My main character is like Donnel but not as good.

What's addictive about being a completionist about Fire Emblem is experimenting with and optimizing each character.

Edit:

Oh yeah good tip about Frederick. That really hurt me at the beginning when I relied on him too much. So when Donnel became OP I realized I shouldn't be relying on Donnel like I used to Frederick.

Hahaha yep. Feel free to dismiss him for the time being if you feel it ruins your game, of course. What level are you?

62. Like I said, I'm doing a new game + on hard mode. It's not nearly as hard as i'd thought it would be.

I'm about to fire up the critically panned Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z to see how it stacks up. I've heard it's a relatively short game, so if it's bad, at least I can clear it out of my backlog pretty quickly.

The new Thief breaks my heart. I'd put up with loading screens, overlapping dialogues and some sound propagation issues here and there, but as it turns out it's just the tip of the iceberg. Worst offender - not even light/shadows work as they should, so, coupled with some serious noise detection issues, they messed up two key mechanics previous games were based on. Nice.

So I've put The Last Remnant and Chrono Trigger both on the back burner (again) cause I really want to finish New Vegas and it's DLC. I think they really struck gold on this game. I'm a pretty big fan of the modern Bethesda first person RPG games, but something about the New Vegas world really pulls me in compared to Fallout 3/Skyrim/Oblivion. Exploring (despite some frustrating invisible walls) is actually pretty entertaining and the environments are super compelling, which is great because combat is not necessarily the focus in this game. I originally beat the game on XBOX a few years back, but I didn't explore nearly as much as I could have. I'm discovering tons of stuff this time around that I never explored (or at least don't remember), including more of a focus on the companions. Plus, with the DLC stuff, I've got a shit load more stuff to explore. I never realised how awesome the soundtrack was, previously, as when I played it on XBOX, I liked having the radio on cause killing people to oldies is great fun, but wow. Great ambient music.

Just beat Bravely Default, and holy shit this game. I only played on Normal mode, and even then I got my shit kicked in more times than I can count. Even when I spent 6 hours grinding to max level and mastering every job--and then promptly running the cheesiest cheese combo ever conceived--the game still stomped my ass into oblivion. Chapter 8, especially, is full of horrors that will keep me awake at night. And this was on Normal mode. I shudder to think of what Hard mode must be like.

But yeah. Great game. I was expecting just a 30-hour rehash of Final Fantasy I with V's job system, but what I got instead was a 72-hour cosmic horror-fest. Gets a bit repetitive between chapters 5-7, but it does serve a purpose, and that purpose is glorious.

New Vegas has a lot of cool stuff going for it but honestly I think it's just too big for its own good. By the time you reach endgame it becomes like 50% Inventory Management Sim, where you're constantly scraping together ammo for your 20 guns, repairing them, picking up spare guns so you can repair them later with Jury Rigging, picking up shit you can use for repair kits, crafting repair kits, crafting ammo for your guns, recycling ammo for your guns, picking up items you can later use to craft ammo for your guns, repairing your armor, picking up spare armor so you can later repair your armor when it gets low, bla bla bla. And if that sounds like overkill, some of the DLC actually include quite challenging enemies so you'll really need all sorts of firepower to fight them. Basically after a certain point you're no longer finding cool new stuff to use, you're just constantly maintaining your massive arsenal.

The problem is the difficulty in the normal game peaks around the beginning, and pretty much continues in a long slide into trivially easy from about the point where you raid the Powder Ganger base. My most recent character had a backpack full of the best laser guns, multiple nuclear warheads of like 4 different varieties, a dozen or so nuclear landmines, and companions who could probably 1v1 just about anything in the game. When there's no real challenge the game gets much less fun.

That said, some of the DLC are absolutely awesome. Dead Money was atmospheric but a little irritating in that the rewards kinda blow, but Old World Blues was top-notch. Complete hilarious nonsense.

I'm kinda worried how easy the bosses in La-Mulana are getting. Once I got Palenque figured out he became totally trivial (thanks to a specific subweapon I had in abundance at the time), and I managed to win the last two sub-bossfights on first attempt. Maybe I should handicap myself, I'm feeling way too OP.

Edit: Okay, no. I'm not overpowered. Baphomet is.

I think that's a problem you run into with a lot Bethesda open-world games; that very open-endedness usually makes it extremely easy to cheese the game past a certain point. By the same token, restricting things too much to avoid that will put a damper on the open-world atmosphere, which I at least have always been a huge fan of when it's executed correctly. Skyrim at least took a few steps to fix this after the colossal clusterfuck of late-game Oblivion, but it's definitely a very difficult problem to find a balanced resolution for.

And to segue a bit into the Elder Scrolls games...I know some people have criticized Oblivion and Skyrim for streamlining things too much. While I generally think most of the streamlining choices have been beneficial for the gameplay (again, particularly in Skyrim), does anyone else really wish they would bring back the massive armor variety of Morrowind? There was nothing cooler than making a lucky break from a dungeon with some powerful enchanted glass right pauldron at level 5 and proudly wearing it alongside your shitty fur armor. Gave a much greater sense of pride in your treasure-finding accomplishments than just finding a big old cuirass and greaves somewhere, of which there are maybe ten armor varieties.

It's almost shocking the fact the 3DS is now the breeding ground for challenging JRPGs. I talked about Fire Emblem earlier, and believe me it's like playing in some chess tournament just to get through the main game, but it also has the Shin Megami Tensei games. Shin Megami Tensei IV is so bad you repeatedly die on the tutorial levels. That's right. The very first thing that you have to do that serves as a tutorial easily kills you. Other than the Souls games, I've never seen that in modern games.

And now apparently Bravely Default is another tough JRPG that should be checked out.

It's almost backwards. You'd think portable games should be easy since you're just fiddling about while waiting around and the consoles should be highly difficult since you're able to invest time at home. But it's the other way around.

You might be surprised to find that a lot of portable game happens right in the home. Of course they're very handy to bring all around, but a lot of people play them on their couches while watching TV, etc.; I've done this personally since the days of the Game Gear.

It's not really shocking about the 3DS and the wealth of great RPG titles. DS was much the same.

I stopped playing Bravely at chapter 5. I will get back to it, but it pissed me off a little bit with the direction they took the story. Battle system was amazing however. And the goddamn music, dat asterisk boss fight track.

Dat final boss music.

Of course, avoid the comments. Some of them include heinous spoilers, including the one hiding right in the game's title.

Baphomet is no more.


Damn now I'm stuck again.

The one thing I really liked about New Vegas was that it was realistically massive, and there were huge distances between points of interest. Just made the whole world more believable to me. I do agree that the difficulty kind of caps off at a certain point. I haven't played the game in two years (I played it on my roommate's awesome PC), but I remember very little giving me a challenge once I was about to buy/locate some of the better weapons. I can't remember if it had a difficulty slider like some of the Elder Scrolls game to keep you on your toes, though.

To Smoking_Gnu: I've said it before, they never got the loot quite right after Morrowind. In Morrowind (and most of the expansions) there was a lot of well hidden artifacts, etc. that made plundering any random thieves' den or cave at least worth the effort. In Oblivion and on the caves were all kind of cookie cutter, and there was rarely anything truly worth your time or effort other than the experience. The quests were still great fun, but come on, we all remember the first time we played Morrowind, just simply walking out into the wilderness and taking on anything we came across without necessarily following the storyline. Definitely one of the game's greatest strengths.

Alright, starting UVHM in Borderlands 2...Looking forward to the endgame expansion packs here.

So after finishing MGS4, I ran some scientific tests and have decided that the proper order of things is 3 > 1 > 4 > 2.

Yeh 3 is the best MGS by a mile imo.

Got rid of the awful camera of 1 & 2, lots lots more actual STEALTH game play then 1 & 2 too, and so many different ways to go about every situation its bonkers, and i prefer the more down to earth story and not having to use that radar for everything.

MGS3 is near perfect imo

I love MGS3 to death, but...

There is no way in the seven hells that MGS4 > MGS2. Or any other MGS for that matter. It's clearly way, way last.

I'm late to the party (as always) but I started playing Spelunky. It's quite a bit of fun thus far! I've done pretty badly on my first attempt but I can already tell I'm going to drop many hours into it.

The major thing that pushed 4 over 2 for me was the fact that I just still never got over the fact that

MGS4 was too disjointed for me, and I really did not enjoy the cutscenes as they were wayyyy too ridiculous (same issue with the Twin Snakes remake of MGS1 cutscenes). Not that the previous games weren't over the top, but MGS4 had more in common with an anime than the influences I thought made MGS1 and MGS3 so great. I thought the way it attempted to tie things up storywise was lacking in grace (admittedly a tall order after the mess MGS2 made). I still put it behind MGS2, because even though MGS2 had some issues, it felt like a more complete game to me, and the last 30-60 minutes of it was surreal and surprising in a way that I hadn't experienced in a videogame before, even if it didn't end up making a lot of sense.

Well its MGS lol it's always gonna be somewhat whacked out, but its nowhere near the mindfuckery of MGS2.

Yeah, I just recalled the nude Raiden segment and how much fuckery it was for me when I first played it. Hell, thinking about it now I still believe it's plain weird.

I only ever played one Metal Gear game, and that was the first Metal Gear Solid on the PS1. Fun game, I recall, but there was one really dull section that consists of several massive backtracks which was always horrible to play. There was also the fight with the Mantis dude, in which you had to do weird shit with the video game controllers or something. Absolutely terrible idea by the developers. But beyond that, it was fun. I remember the sequence of ending events being really cool, melee fight with the antagonist atop a giant machine of war, boss fight with said machine, then getting the fuck out in a cool vehicle pursuit. I'd hate to think how dated the gameplay would feel today, though.