i love sunlightblade lol

and yeah if you kill the bastards enough they don't respawn. this isn't true for every enemy, but a lot of them. and yeah backstep, to my knowledge, functions the same way.

Yup, in Ds2 once they are gone are gone!
The backstep has less frames than the roll, but if you attack immediately after you get to do a running attack, wich is useful with some weapons

(*_*) (heart eyes)

I can't wait to play more. I stayed up until about 3 am so I'm not in the best place mentally, will probably get destroyed. I saw a couple people in those countdowns playing with what looked like dual-wielding Katanas. That seems fun.

If you dual-wield, you absolutely need to know Powerstance: any youtube video will be more clear than i can ever be!

Using a Bonfire Ascetic will make the area you use it in revert to its 'factory default', with all enemies, bosses and items(!) restored, even if you've killed the enemies so many times that they've stopped spawning. The catch: all enemies and bosses in said area will now be at a New Game Plus level of toughness. If you use it again in the same area, they'll leap to an NG+2 level of difficulty, and so on. The second catch: this carries over on ALL your future NG+ playthroughs on that file, so if you beat the game and go to NG+, all the areas you've used an Ascetic on once will be NG+2 levels of toughness on that go-around.

Ah, okay. I think I have one of those in my inventory somewhere, I was kind of curious about it. That makes perfect sense.

Morn: I will look into it. Gonna stand so powerfully.

The enemies de-spawning doesn't happen at all if you play in the Company of Champions covenant. It also makes all enemies deal about 20% more damage and receive about 20% less (if you've ever played in coop with 2 phantoms, you'll notice how enemy defenses are buffed and you deal less damage -- so that kind of nerf applies here, but you're forced to solo because you can't summon while in that covenant).

And yeah, powerstance is fuuuun. You need 1.5x the stat requirements of your weapons, two "compatible" weapons (like two swords, two curved swords, etc. but not, say, a giant axe and a scimitar), and you hold triangle, and you'll enter a difference stance, which unlocks new, stronger attacks with L1 and L2.

It's my favourite innovation from DS2, and it's... not remotely explained ANYWHERE in the game. Dammit, From.

Hahhaah I love that they don't explain shit. HLD. Every 2D game I'm obsessed with has taken small or large chunks from the Souls playbook. Pretty neat.

Going to be a while before I can do a power stance with my scimitar I guess. I could try two lesser swords soon, don't know if that's worth doing.

Finished my first playthrough of ELEX. Took me around 100 hours and I still skipped about half the content. Best action RPG I've played since New Vegas, though I don't think it quite beats NV. ELEX is a lot more challenging, has a better world in every possible way, carries a much more interesting combat system and it looks about 10,000X better than New Vegas ever could (even with graphics mods), but the writing, voice acting and most importantly quest design/choice and consequence can't quite match up to the insanely high bar set by New Vegas. It does come surprisingly close though; some of the multi-stage quests have such a wide array of variations and ways to approach them I have absolutely no idea how you could even QA something like that. The fact it's a game made by 2 dozen people makes it even more mind boggling, I have no idea how the hell they pulled it off.

So if you like exploration-heavy hardcore action RPGs with quests and minimal handholding and can look past subpar animations and a mediocre translation, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It's far from perfect but it also provides an experience that I can promise you have never played before.

Frog's comments about the game being "trash" and then going on to extol the virtues of DS2 is kind of funny to me.

We already figured out that you feel the need to position yourself as some kind of rebellious, contrarian, oppositional special guy, you don't have to bring that point up again and again. That's what your title says loud and clear, so no need for any more repetition of that, okay?
Elex is a rough gem like any other Piranha bytes game, with no chance of living up to the polish of any Souls game and that's that.

Ohhh...kay? Because the Souls series itself is so immaculately polished?


Not that polish has much to do with quality anyway; CoD campaigns are the zenith of polish. No, my complaint with Frog was just that he was dunking on a game he hasn't played that genuinely tries to do something unique and ambitious, then pedestals a formulaic franchise game.

I couldn't care less about where public opinion is or isn't, and I'm perplexed that you'd even make that assumption.

It's certainly not "immaculate", but the production standards are towering 150 ft (or 45,72 meters) over what piranha bytes have been producing for almost two decades now. I completely agree that there's a lot to like in their games, but simply saying "yeah just look over the completely crap animations and horrible translation" (by the way, the german voiceovers fucking suck as well!) won't cut it because this is something that is so crucial to many people that it definitely puts Elex at the 6/10 region for those who do care. This is an RPG after all and many people look for immersion into the game world when they play RPGs.
And nobody is impressed if the development team consists of only 24 people, when they clearly bit of more than they could chew in regards to the polish and getting their game up to the standards of 2017 and not spring 2005.

And also, give me a fucking break. The work that has been put into the various boss and level designs alone makes this statement edgelordery once again. This really reads like code for "It's popular, so it's bad". And on the other hand "it's so underrated, so it derserves some bonus points in the quality department!". No!

Edit:
If I wanted to go that far, I could even call Elex a "formulaic, typical Piranha Bytes franchise game", but I won't. Because that would mean I would be using your topsy-turvy methods of arguing.

There's nothing inherently wrong with having a "formula" to your games if it leads to fun for the player, and you continually attempt to improve/expand on that formula.

I really like Elex, but I've experienced too much lag on PS4 to go on any further.

The longer I played the game, the more problems I had with it. The whole point of that game is to sink hours into it, but the map would start to lag as I played more and more and even things like opening the inventory which has to be done constantly started taking up to five seconds to open. With how massive the game is, I just couldn't do it any more.

I really liked the game and I was warned about playing it on a console, but I was never going to play it on a PC.

Oh well. There was a sale on Horizon: Zero Dawn the other day and I'm having a lot of fun with this game.

I've always thought Horizon: ZD LOOKS cool. Like just on a pure aesthetic, I'm-an-8-year-old-boy-and-I-wanna-ride-dinosaurs-and-shoot-bow-and-arrows kinda deal. Any elaboration on the way the game plays and handles would be cool. I spotted that sale as well.

Wow, darkeningday really couldn't just praise Elex, he had to shit on Dark Souls too because... reasons?

Pathetic trolling, even for him.


It plays really well. For a western-made game (sorry but you know the Japanese devs are always better at it ), the combat and character movement are particularly excellent. Controlling Aloy is fluid and responsive, and the machine combat gives you a lot of options to take out the robot creatures. It's mainly range-based, though there are some very basic melee attacks (once you unlock the stagger skill for the heavy attack, it actually becomes useful since it can stun enemies, otherwise it's mediocre, the light attack is pretty much always useless). You got a good variety of bows, slings, ropecasters to pin machines down, you can set traps and tripwires, different types of projectiles to exploit machine weaknesses, and it's fairly easy to swap between projectile types too.

Bonus: the main story is actually really, really good too. I was pleasantly surprised on that. Side-quests can be a bit generic, but there's not so many of them that they become too tedious. The game has good restraint and pacing like that, it doesn't throw a million boring fetch quests or pointless collectibles at you everytime you unlock a square inch of map. It has just enough to keep you occupied for a bit while you explore.

And yes, the visuals are mind-blowing. Best-looking open-world game I've seen (AssCreed Origins might be up there too, from what I saw of it). The photo mode is horribly addictive.

Some shots of the DLC I took:



And if you think "photo mode is cheating", well, here are two unaltered (that is, no photo mode filters or anything) gameplay shots from the base game... that's on a regular PS4, not a PS4 pro. The game looks insanely good, even better in motion.

Well...damn. That sounds awesome! I'm glad to know the actual game handles really well. I may try to snag that if the sale is still going. Thanks! Some of those screens are gorgeous.

It'll be awhile before I play it though probably. It's so weird to feel this enthusiastic about video games in a general sense. Even as a child I wasn't this enthusiastic to pick up a controller. I'm currently ACTIVELY playing: Dark Souls 2, Hyper Light Drifter, Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment, and Rocket League (my love, always, forever). I'm casually playing Hotline Miami, Nuclear Throne, Towerfall Ascension, and Dishonored 2 (very casually, on that one). It's pretty cool to find out that video games are fun again.

I really enjoy the bow and arrows you use to hunt in the game and I think they did a real good job with combat. I've killed a lot of animals/robots in the game and am still not bored with it. I really enjoy how in-depth the game is with scanning enemies and shooting certain areas of their body for optimum damage.

Funny you say that, because I remember you using public consensus to justify your preferences or attack those of others in the movie thread. More than once, in fact.

Dear God. I can relate with that list of games you are actively playing. Lately, it seems like every time I turn around there's another game I want. I think it's safe to say the next console systems (xbone, ps4) are finally humming along real well after how few good games there were at launch. I wasn't going to buy anything till I finished Elex, but that sale on Horizon: ZD was too juicy for me to pass up.

You completely sold me on Hyper Light Drifter, but I'm not going to buy that till I finish Horizon.

I forgot to add Into the Gungeon to the casual list. I fucking suck so bad but it's really addicting.

You're not going to be disappointed with HLD. I've started calling it Bright Souls now that I've played DS2 a bit. It's got a lot of that solitary, lonely feeling that DS evokes. But everything is so bright and fucking gorgeous. I can't even explain like...my girl doesn't play games at all but she's usually in the same room with me when I am. She literally put her book down the other night to comment on how much she liked the sounds that Hyper Light Drifter makes. And she's completely right. Every item pick-up, every door you open, enemy killed, "coin" picked up...it's so fucking delicious to the ears. I usually play with my headset on if I'm alone, just to get even further immersed.

Speaking of Hyper Bright Souls: I just defeated the southern boss.

I refuse to see the ending yet though. There is so much I haven't done. I don't have all six triangles in ANY area. I only have two outfits. I'm not even close to done yet. I do think it's the best game I've ever had the pleasure of playing, and I hope Heart Machine can produce something else before homies ticker gives out on him.

Also sorry for the double-post but I just want to say that I die a little bit each day waiting for Eitr. I want to play it so god damned bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4EWdcoSpAo

Yeah, who needs context when strawmanning is just so much more fun!

But it's telling you'd think that criticising one particular installment is tantamount to "shitting" on an entire franchise. I was just annoyed someone would literally trash the best open-world game so far this generation while at the same time propping up the most by-the-numbers installment of a good franchise.

But no one's trashing Breath of the Wild, only Elex.

Would be interested to see the quest in BotW where, through a winding, nonlinear path of objectives demarcated by skill checks and moral quandaries, Link inadvertently causes the mass slaughter of an entire city, permanently deleting entire quest chains, unique inventory stock and characters you've grown to like.

Speaking of open-world RPGs, I beat Wasteland 2 Director's Cut recently. I can't say it's an excellent game, but it was very good. The combat especially was very intuitive and, for an RPG with relatively complex character building, stats, and tons of equipment, the information was all very well-presented and sensible. I always felt like I knew what I was doing and why, without having to consult guides or whatnot. The game itself is fucking huge and has a ton of complex quests to sink your teeth into. My only sort-of gripe is that it's a tad bland - I'm not a big fan of Fallout's retro-50s silliness, but Wasteland eschews most of that and then doesn't really replace it. The setting is more realistic but just a tad dull.

Overall though, it's a very good game, and one of the best retro-RPGs I've played lately. Definitely better than Pillars of Eternity.

The Mummy Demastered continues to be both annoying and great.


Dude, that's fucking like your entire thing: propping something up by taking a big, greasy shit on something else.

And for someone who, as a rule, hates popular, successful games that everyone else loves, he sure knows how to have a hissy fit when someone criticises one he likes.

Second half is brilliant, imho, but I thought the first half dragged way too much. But yeah, combat was fantastic if not exactly super intuitively designed--never played much of the Director's Cut though, so maybe it was fixed for that version. Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition on Tactician difficulty was better imo, but the writing was slightly worse, although that one wasn't really open world. Both excellent games in their own right.


No and no. Too many obvious contrary examples to even be worth bothering to debunk. Even on this very page, such as the much-loved (and my favorite open-world aRPG besides NotR), Fallout: New Vegas. Hell, even in this very post.

For some reason I assumed Nioh and Bloodborne didn't have the same extensive character customization options as the Souls games. What a fool I've been. Just fucking...have all my money I guess.

edit: Also, I want to play Necropolis. But not for $30. I would probably do $20. But a half-off sale for Thanksgiving would be so dope. I'd like to play Absolver on the cheap too. It's obviously nothing more than a combat mechanic wrapped up in a video game simulacrum but I still think the one single thing it does looks kinda fun?

What are you talking about? I saw the full context and there is no "strawman" going on.


This is literally: "I was annoyed that someone trashed Game A which I loved, and praised Game B which I didn't". That right here is literally the reason you brought up Game B in your mini-review of Game A, even though they are 100% unrelated and have nothing in common and are not trying to achieve the same things whatsoever.

This is textbook trolling, if you have even a hint of self-awareness you'd have the decency to admit it.


Hah, well, they aren't as extensive I'd say. In Nioh there is no character creator. You play a pre-defined character, but you can "reskin" him by buying alt character skins with in-game currency (he still shows up as William in cut scenes). Gameplay-wise you do have a lot of customization options, in terms of stats, builds, playstyles, though not quite as much as Dark Souls I'd say.

In Bloodborne you have a full character creator like in Souls game and it's pretty solid. Visually, there are fewer options for Fashion Souls, mostly because of the setting; Dark Souls has outfits ranging from armours from most periods and places of history, such as medieval knights, samurai-, viking-, Roman-, etc.-style armours, but also various mage robes, adventurer clothes, ninja garbs, etc. Whereas Bloodborne mostly just has variants of Victorian-style tunics and coats, because, well, having a full-blown European platemail would be weird. xD Gameplay-wise it's also a bit more limited; the "magic" system is more limited, and there aren't as many possible builds and playstyles, though there's a few.

So, in other words, the level of customization, both for visuals and gameplay, isn't quite as extensive as in Souls game, but it's still pretty decent. In Bloodborne I've made (the closest thing I could to) a female samurai, an old-west style gunslinger, a crazy "bestial" claw-spamming woman, etc. I even made a King Diamond cosplay (hey, how could I resist with that top hat...). I've seen some clever versions of Alucard (both the SotN one and the Helsing anime one), D from Vampire Hunter D, Vanessa from Penny Dreadful, the Joker, etc. And of course some neat original creations too. The character creator isn't as good as Dragon's Dogma's, but it's still pretty good.

So every instance of the statement, "Says the person who likes/says X" is trolling now? My butt was hurt by comments trashing a game I adore, and at the top of the page that same person was heaping praise on something I came away from very negatively. Sorry if my throwaway, half-serious jab at a specific person came off as some sort of declaration of war.

Just finished Shinobi 2 on my Android tablet. Jesus fuck, that was extraordinarily difficult. The game is hard enough as it is, but the touchscreen controls were just god-awful. I'm not sure I want to play emulated games on it anymore after this (it was an official Sega port/emulation).

I'd say Shinobi 2 is overall significantly more dickish and harder than its far more popular successor. The movement in Shinobi 3 is leagues better and more fluid (at least you can fucking run) for one thing, and there's no bullshit dual plane level mechanic, and even the enemy placements are more forgiving. Really the only hard thing in Shinobi 3 was the platforming in the final level. In Shinobi 2, the difficulty curve ramps up insanely after the first 2 levels: somersaulting to avoid enemies also makes you switch level planes and lands you in the middle of other enemies you weren't even planning to avoid, soldiers lob grenades at you from offscreen and behind obstacles where you can't prefire them, and that pixel perfect jump in the seaport is !!! And the bosses... Arnold, Mother Brain, Spiderman & Batman (fuck those two) and Mechagodzilla? They're not even hard, just massive pushovers if you don't have fireballs, which are super easy to lose because of how the game trolls you with enemy placements. I constantly had to restart 3 levels in because killing Mother Brain with regular shurikens takes too damn long; long enough that restarting is less maddening and probably even faster.

This all makes me wonder why Sega didn't port Shinobi 3 instead, because it's more popular and fun. Of course Sega chose to port Shinobi 2 instead of 3 for mobile. The sheer amount of forced 30 second advertisement dicks I had to suck on my journey to beat this game was damn near insurmountable; almost violating, but at the same time consensual because I really wanted to finish the fucking thing. That, and people are generally unfamiliar with 2 and so might have more incentive to play it. Or really just some licensing thing, I don't fucking know. God, those dicks. How I miss my PC.

How can you do this to yourself? A classic hardcore sidescrolling platformer with touchscreen controls? That would drive me up the wall as well. There's nothing better than button feedback and not having your fingers blocking the view of what's goint on. Just get a rasbperry Pi with emulators on it and a nice little controller for it, but don't play games that were designed for a controller on a touchscreen, except it's something that doesn't involve reflexes/action/accuracy.

This is borderline self torture. What's next, Ninja Gaiden?

Exactly how did you expect me to stop when the game was dropping beats like this? Them grooves pump you up, man. Yuzo Koshiro doesn't fuck around. I still much prefer S3's music though, easily one of the best Genesis OSTs.
Also, the sense of "what the fuck just happened, how did I die" every time you get to a new stage. The one with the highway and cars, especially. Took me a while to figure out that only the red car can run you over. Didn't help that a dozen ninja women were also simultaneously taking a dump on me.

Raspberry Pi costs 3x normal price where I live, so I think I'll pass on that for now.

Anyone with Twitter who wants to help...

https://twitter.com/morrigan_stark/stat ... 4110562305

Basically, it's a "game photo" contest, here are my entries, there's a category for "most likes" on social media, so I'd appreciate a few votes, though I don't expect much since I'm low-profile. But who knows? All 3 pics are from Horizon Zero Dawn's new DLC, The Frozen Wilds (the theme is "fall colours with some winter chill"). Thanks!

This is why I miss my Xperia Play. Not many compatible games on the Google Play Store that interested me, but it was great for emulators. Having a library of SNES and PSX games in my pocket with an actual controller to play them on was a fucking luxury. I'm gonna have to dig it out and repair it sometime.

Yeah the Sonys were good for that with the Dual Shock compatibility and all. With a generic bluetooth controller (there are SOME good ones around) you should be able to do the same thing with any android smartphone though.

I have this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Snakebyte-Gamepa ... dpSrc=srch

For mobile gaming I carry my Switch with me in my backpack though. Lightweight and high quality screen and controls and focused on gaming.

Oh, I'm aware you can hook up a controller to a phone. But this is what I was talking about:



It has shoulder buttons too (only two of them, so for PSX games requiring all four you have to map them elsewhere). Such a handy little device.

Even the "touch sticks" were way better than expected, though that came down to the individual game. For some Android games they were completely unusable and for others they felt smooth and precise. Like I said though, I used the controller mainly for emulators and for that it was perfect.