This is admittedly one thing I can't really argue against when people bring it up. Gets a little silly later on when you're charging up to level 5+ or something, but the damage is usually worth it. Fun though? Hmm...

SD3 did away with this along with the "percentage" for the cooldown. There's still cooldown, but it definitely feels a lot faster. Instead of charging weapons, they introduced a tech/skill system. Each hit on an enemy builds up your bar, once you build it up to a certain point you can use a tech. They can range from a cool combo attack, a big circular swing doing heavier damage, to things that hit every enemy on the screen. These are also different depending on the classes you choose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rb91C232Sg

SD3 also shows the exp on screen when you defeat an enemy, one of my nitpicks in SoM. You have to go through the menus to see how much more exp you need, and kind of just guess what the enemies are giving.

SD3 is worth a look.

Welcome. You should get Wild ARMs, it's better than LoD.

He's fun to watch but I always play him wrong. I try to make it a boxing match with him by overusing his normal attacks and doing his bobbing and weaving type moves.

I saw Daigo's first match and it's interesting he went from Ryu to Evil Ryu. It almost mirrors the story. The most well known character being used by the most well known fighting game player both succumbing to darkness to be more powerful.

It would be more fun to watch him win than Infiltration cause Akuma/Gouki can be boring to watch. Too many people use them and it's always nice to see other characters used to high potential.

What's crazy is before seeing Daigo I saw a cripple with no use of his legs, minimal use of his arms, and using his mouth to play, use an amazing Chun Li. I have no idea how he was able to pull off Chun Li's moves like that. Chun Li isn't execution heavy, but still to be able to do what he did was just awe inspiring.

Speaking of execution heavy characters, I notice the best females who compete in Evo don't use execution heavy characters. They tend to use characters where good solid fundamentals and outsmarting matters rather than overwhelm their opponent with characters like Viper. I wonder if it's biological, cultural, or what.

I bought an Xbox 360 controller for the PC, so I can play Dark Souls and other games with native support. Looking forward to trying Oath in Felghana with it.

Ys 4 has been lurking in my Steam library since that promo at GamesCom a few years ago. So, guess I should try it out seeing how everyone's suddenly talking about it?

If you're talking about Oath in Felghana, that's Ys 3.

Yep, that one.

Infiltration, Daigo and Dieminion were all eliminated on Friday. My response is both, "haha!" and "FUCK."

Well I already have LoD and Twisted Metal Black (which really, you can get the full experience of that game with Youtube anyway). Seems like a lot of lame games I don't care about. I'll probably pick up the Wild ARMs games because jrpg, I just hope it's not super cliche story wise (like, I liked LoD a lot when it came out, but all it took was for one person to point out that 90% of its major plot points were stolen from FFVII, which was something that became almost game-destroyingly obvious once I noticed). Also Dino Crisis 1 & 2 because A) My brother is a big Resident Evil fan, and it's just Resi 2 with dinosaurs and B) I love seeing such a ridiculously stupid premise played so straight. And now that I think about it, C) Was there NOBODY in that conference room who could think of a better title than "Dino Crisis"? That's got to be the worst name in the history of videogames.

lol, Dino Crisis was pretty cool. The door code puzzles were hilarious, probably the hardest puzzles in all of that Capcom stuff.



Cheat code magazines anyone?

Hah wow. That's crazy. Were they eliminated by new players or by known pros like Tokido or someone?

My 2nd choice was Sako. If Sako gets eliminated I give up on Evo predictions

Dieminion was eliminated by ridiculous 'gief player, Snake Eyez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIcysaN06Ig

Daigo was eliminated by a rival and Infiltration was eliminated by one of Japan's Five Gods playing Akuma. You can read / see it all here: http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2014/jul/ ... -4-videos/

EDIT: I guess Infiltration's defeater isn't one of the Five Gods. But he's definitely Japanese.

And yeah, I'm not much for predictions, but there's a handful of players I watch and pay attention to.

I'm a bit surprised that more people haven't played SD3. It has to be one of the most popular ROMs ever.


Funny thing, I always wondered what Kevin's "Veritubach" meant. Now I know that it's the romanization of the Japanese transliteration of "belly-to-back" (the suplex).

The story in WA is decent. Clichés are surprisingly minimal with more subversions and reversals than you'd think. It has some sappy moments, but it has its very epic moments too. I like the game better than FF7 overall. A lot of people on NeoGAF asked about it, so I wrote a small blurb about the game:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.ph ... tcount=560

I didn't get far enough in LoD to see all the FF7 aping, because the game was so goddamn boring.

I've seen Snake Eyes. He's probably the world's best Zangief. And like the commentators said Guile's lack of mobility makes it easy for Zangief to catch him with throws.

I'm surprised at the Daigo match. Choi won with just good basics vs. the high combo damage potential of Evil Ryu. So fundamentals beat out flashiness this time.

Infiltration's loss is kind of funny. He seems to be weak at mirror matches. Tokido beat him last year and he lost this year in a mirror match.

I never got much into predicting Evo before cause I never watched much of it. Last year I had an operation so on bedrest I watched 2012 and 2013. So I'm taking a stab at predicting 2014.

After seeing these results:

http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2014/jul/ ... -and-more/

Good to see Rose on top 8 and my call of Sako taking it still has a chance.

If Bonchan wins with Sagat and Snake Eyes wins his match with Zangief, Zangief vs. Sagat is ridiculously in Sagat's favor. I don't see Ultra balancing that match up. If Bonchan loses, Snake Eyes has a good chance this year.

I think losers bracket will be Sako vs. Luffy with Sako coming out on top, but I wanna see my Rose win

Daigo isn't really a flashy player, though. He just didn't seem on top of his game, because there's a few spots in that match where I went, "there's no way he should've been hit by that." Even something as simple as the final overhead attack seemed like a strange way for Daigo to go. And whatever, I've never held him on a pedestal like a lot of people in the FGC do, but he is without a doubt, extremely talented, so it's always fun to see where he ends up. He used to main Guile, actually. I've always considered him a fundamentals type of player, so his loss this year was especially bizarre, because his play is very simple but impactful.

I wouldn't call Daigo flashy either, but he regularly hits combos I would drop. He also has good reactions. His natural skill level is beyond mine.

But John Choi beat Daigo using my level of dexterity and timing. It was my level of physical skill but mentally outplaying Daigo and I didn't think such a thing would be possible for the same reason I don't expect to see many 5'9" professional basketball players.

And yeah Daigo fanboys are so dumb. You can honestly say he's among the world's best, but fanboys say stuff like "He lost that round on purpose to read his opponent" and deny a legit loss.

Seems like a decent enough game to at least give a whirl. And it's only a buck, so even if I hate it I'm out what... a bottle of pop from a vending machine? I'll get 'em both. How's the second one compare?

As for LoD. I do admit that the pace is a little slow and the translation goes from funny to irritating pretty quickly, but in essence I did like the battle system. I get the complaint about how it's really repetitive, since really it's just like mashing the Attack button over and over again like every FF in history with an added timing puzzle, but I like how it's set up so you really can't zone out and cruise on autopilot. You have to stay engaged and that keeps it interesting in some ways. The Dragoon fighting is cool enough in theory too, though the execution is a little mangled. That's basically most of the game in a nutshell: there are a lot of good ideas I'd like to see refined/expanded on, but Sony has made it clear since pretty much the beginning that they never planned a sequel for it. And it's what, fourteen or fifteen years later and they still haven't changed their mind? Bummer, with some balancing and more customization I think there's a lot of potential in there.

Also why the fuck do you get 255 slots to hold equipment but only 32 for items? Item's don't stack, and as you go through the game you'll get lots of repeating items that you'd be insane to throw away, so by the end of the game you've got about half of that to keep healing items stocked up, and you can only use magic when in Dragoon form, which is something you'll obviously want to save for big battles, so it keeps you pretty well fucked for most of the time. Like really, there aren't even 255 pieces of equipment in the whole fucking game. I'm willing to bet there aren't even half of that number. It's such a huge potentially game breaking problem that should be such an easy fix. Drives me nuts.

Also, it's not common for a simple unchecked punish or whiffed combo to swing things in the other direction as well. I see it all the time at this level of play as I'm sure you do if you watch it somewhat regularly. Me personally? I wouldn't mind throwing out an occasional random super if I could get a few hits off of it or something. But I also like to go dirty for a few seconds if I can get things back in my direction, haha. Also, that's probably why I'm not competing at their level. No patience!

Anyway, do you watch Excellent Adventures on Cross Counter TV?

So true. Even the bullet hell part. Goddamn those bosses. O_O

lol, maybe I should quit while I'm ahead...

So I've finally gotten around to playing Planescape: Torment and I already see why it has its reputation. The writing and characterisation is really damn good with an amazing setting. Some pretty fleshed-out and complex lore as well, from what I've seen.

Ha. I was going to mention the bullet hell part to you. Makes for some really crazy boss fights. The last boss in particular is insane.

"I can't take this..."

grind more

How in the hell are people having trouble with Oath in Felghana? I sleepwalked through that game (along with VII and Memories of Celceta), and the only thing I remember kicking my ass is the lava pits.

Ahhh, looks like there's a downloadable version on gog.com that's compatible with Mac OSX 10.7+. Rad, I need to upgrade my system anyway, so apart from avoiding utter obsolescence and a complete lack of support there's never been a better reason!!

(heh...the promo video for the game on that site is...uh...juvenile...a little... someone please remind whoever edited that to never edit things. nice music, though.)

Congrats on being some sort of gaming god, then. These games are generally considered very difficult by the majority of players. Bosses that can kill you in seconds with projectiles that fill the entire screen are not exactly considered casual.

Indeed. Even as far back as the first Ys, being just a couple levels under where you "should" be to tackle an area can cause enemies to kill you almost instantly and you to do little to no damage against them. So sometimes, the difference between "really hard" and "cakewalk" is just a matter of how leveled you are when you tackle an area.

Got all three. May never get around to playing any of them (played LoD around 14/15 years ago), but for 3 bucks I might as well grab them, since I have a passing interest.

No I don't regularly watching fighting game videos. Just Evo.

Wow my Rose actually won Evo. And the first time Europe ever took it.

I'm surprised at how Sako played. He was dropping combos. When he was hitting his combos he was taking off like 1/2 health. He seemed way off his game this time around.

It's nice to see something unexpected this year. This year wasn't that impressive because people haven't fully mastered the new gameplay of Ultra, so 2015 will probably be the one to really anticipate.

Yeah, it's a classic for good reason, definitely the best characters/plot/setting in any RPG I've ever played, at least. Honestly though, it's almost more of an adventure game, as conversation is often much better than combat, even in terms of XP gains. Also the combat system is kinda shitty and not balanced all that well, pretty much the only flaw in the game. Stats are still important though, as they can have big effects on your conversation options.

But is it, though? Another asian guy won another fighting game tournament.

Hah I was thinking nationality but yeah good point.

Some of the matches this year were really boring. Snake Eyes and Fuudo had a great mastery of spacing with the way they were inching closer but it doesn't make for a fun match to watch. Everyone just seemed to play very careful.

Compared to this Gamerbee vs. Daigo match. Blows being traded back and forth, sudden shifts in momentum, and characters moving all over the place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naMrMCTNJSk

I've seen a lot of negative opinions regarding the combat system. I can somewhat see it, as it's certainly far from the games highlight, but I wouldn't go as far to say it's bad. It feels like a streamlined, simplistic version of Baldur's Gate's system with fights that aren't make or break due to micro-pausing and managing every second of the combat. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind Infinity Engine combat (though I vastly prefer the full turn-based of Fallout) but the constant pausing and micro-managing gets a little tedious for me, so it doesn't rub me up the wrong way due to Torment's simplicity. If that makes any sense.

But yeah, the characters are a blast. I'm now up to the part where Annah has joined and we're about to set off in search of my previous spot of death. Her interactions with Morte are amusing, to say the least. And I was laughing my ass off with the whole section regarding Morte and the lost-plane traveler woman's (Ingriss?) teeth. Usually when these Infinity Engine games try for comedy it just fails for me, but in Torment is actually gives me a kick. I love it.

Is it bad I need doses of instant satisfaction? I couldn't get into Planescape when I checked it out a few years back.

Reminds me of spending hours in Fallout just walking around the towns. I feel weird about it after awhile.

I GOT HELL KNIGHTS TO BLOW UP

God I hate Plutonia. I forget how ugly and boring the texturing is in a lot of too. BROWN bricks, everywhere. Brown. Brown before brown was an Unreal engine joke.

I have to confess that I never played Zelda before, so I decided to start at the very beginning. The old 8-bit adventure must have aged well because despite being primitive it's just a very engaging, well balanced, varied and fun game. The subliminal symbolism is a bit disturbing though...

As far as I'm aware, that was done because that sunwheel symbol (what now looks like an inverse swastika) was a common spiritual symbol in certain branches of Buddhism (I may be wrong on the religion there.)

Awesome to hear that you're embarking on the Zelda train - particularly looking forward to hearing your first playthrough of Ocarina of Time.

OoT doesn't hold up as much for me anymore. I grew up on the damn thing and it holds a very special place in my childhood but having replayed it a few times in the last few years it hasn't aged as well as Majora's Mask. Now that game is a top contender for favorite game. What it lacks in being as epic as Oot it makes up in every other way and surpasses OoT's longevity. I'm more interested in how he'll think of that.

Fair point. I actually never beat OoT on my first playthrough at 11 years old (Water Temple, hurr hurr hurr) but beat my first Zelda game ever when I played through Majora's Mask 3 years later. IMO Majora's Mask has some excellent points - amazing temple design, that incredibly surreal atmosphere - but, even after replaying Ocarina with a more critical mindset, MM still lacks that sense of epic, apocalyptic scope present in Ocarina (of which Dark Souls is the only other game I know of to capture such an atmosphere so effectively.) The sense of progression from being a little kid running around in a magical talking tree to fighting off zombies and demons in a desecrated landscape is just amazing. A very common and archetypal story, sure, but never delivered in quite the same way that OoT did.