Coelacanth
@Coelacanth@feddit.nu
- Comment on All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity 1 hour ago:
That reminds me I need to refresh my backups and prepare for the day the HDD gives out.
- Comment on All 54 lost clickwheel iPod games have now been preserved for posterity 2 hours ago:
Anyone else still use their old clickwheel iPod or just me?
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 13 hours ago:
I imagine a non-insignificant portion of Silksong players never played HK and just jumped on the hype bandwagon. Which makes sense considering it was built up like it would literally pay off your mortgage and reunite you with your high school sweetheart.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 21 hours ago:
To be fair Ninja Gaiden Black* did also have boss runbacks. It’s one of a handful of small complaints I have about what is otherwise a very close to perfect game (Chapter 9 in the military base being one of the others).
But NG2 did have boss checkpoints, yes, and was much better for it. Even the notoriously player-challenging Itagaki realised after one game that boss runbacks sucked, and this was in 2008 - Demon Souls wasn’t even out.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 21 hours ago:
To each their own, I always think of difficulty and challenge as proportional and relative to the individual. You can just as easily turn the question around the other way: how can you feel any satisfaction beating a Souls game using magic and summons and level ups and items when there are people who have beat it at Level 1 hitless and using a dance pad instead of controller? What’s “appropriately challenging” is way too individual for the bluntness of a single difficulty setting.
And coming up with solutions isn’t even that hard. Add some sliders to adjust the length of parry windows and i-frames on dodge rolls and whatnot and you’re probably a good part of the way there. Gameplay intact, people still go through the same motions they just have a chance now even if they don’t have the reflexes or timing for frame-perfect inputs.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 21 hours ago:
Yes indeed, when arcade games were the norm devs specifically designed for absurd difficulty ramp ups and cheap deaths to finagle another quarter out of you.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 1 day ago:
Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.
- Comment on Massive Gaming Crossover: Among Us Teams Up with Popular RPG 1 day ago:
Damn they sold out huh.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 1 day ago:
Not everything that makes the game harder or more challenging to play is good game design though, and a game shouldn’t get a free pass just because its developers stated “well the game being hard is part of our artistic vision”. It’s fine to criticise things, even - or actually maybe especially - things we like. We don’t have to be binary about things, we can like something while still recognising its flaws.
Excessive runbacks for example is something that is primarily concerned with disrespecting your time as a player and even FromSoft seem to have realised that they’re not a good addition or a fun way of increasing difficulty seeing as they introduced Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 1 day ago:
I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which people had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?
There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.
- Comment on Scary games. . ? 2 days ago:
I’m thirding Alien: Isolation, one of the best horror games ever made and a really loving tribute to the movies as well. On console they even had a feature where the alien listened in on you through the microphone and would hear if you made a noise. Not sure how it played out in practice as I didn’t play it on console but sounds rad.
The Outlast games are also frequently brought up as great horror games. I haven’t played them myself but have seen them played by others. Look pretty good, though a little more jumpscare heavy. Still atmospheric though.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
What niche does this community fill that the other four to six general purpose gaming communities fail to? Stricter moderation? Only OC posts? No news article posts? What differentiates this from !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk for example?
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 4 days ago:
Well, I was merely speaking in general, I didn’t actually buy Silksong! 😅 The combination of being prohibitively difficult and having tons of tricky platforming (I hate platforming) means I’m just doing like with Hollow Knight and staying away to save myself the frustration.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 4 days ago:
To each their own, but when I played through Blasphemous just recently it felt like the game had tons of design elements intended to either piss you off or deliberately waste your time or both.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 4 days ago:
The 2D sidescroller base that’s at the foundation of Metroidvanias is quite a bit older than that, though, so I think it’s fair to call it an older genre. Even though it is fairly evergreen.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now 4 days ago:
Buying on GOG is always the play whenever the option is available.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 4 days ago:
If you can stomach it it’s still for sale on Epic I’m pretty sure. Otherwise yeah, Ms Fitgirl provides, and I did use her services this time.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 5 days ago:
I think 2 is almost equally or more of a masterpiece as 3 when considering how extremely rare truly branching path story games are.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 5 days ago:
Alan Wake 2 is one of my favourite games of all time, and if you like the story it’s definitely worth considering playing. Yes, it is a bit more of a horror game, but it’s phenomenal. I recommend watching a recap of Control and its AWE DLC, as they directly tie into the plot of Alan Wake 2.
If you really truly can’t stomach horror games, both Welonz and Mapocolops have great AW2 playthroughs.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 5 days ago:
I finished Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge. Despite everything, I’m very happy to have finished the whole trilogy. I’ve become quite fond of this series, and I’m already very keen on going back and playing NGB and NG2 again sometime soon. Especially curious to compare the Ninja Gaiden 2 White mod with the original NG2 experience.
NG3RE is a bad game. I could rant about it for hours. It has one of the worst stories I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing, and in attempting to be a “story focused” game it actively gets in the way of your enjoyment constantly. It’s a QTE-infested fuckfest, its extremely solid combat system isn’t even allowed to shine due to poor gameplay design and it has the worst bosses in the whole series - a series that was already infamous for bad bosses, by the way. That final boss was an absolute shitshow and I can’t believe I made it through. Had I not saved up all the Max HP upgrades in the skill tree to use as health potions in the final fight I wouldn’t have been able to. Also, they actually had the game end on a fucking QTE.
If you must play it to see the whole series, install this mod, set Ninpo generation to 1.5, damage multiplier to 1.35 and enemy block rate reduction to 85. I played around with it a bit and it actually makes the combat feel alright and lets you mostly ignore Steel On Bone QTE instakills and heal with Ninpo instead, as well as actually play around with your combo strings to kill enemies.
To follow, and continuing my Itagaki journey I found out he and some other Ninja Gaiden 2 people in the Soleil studio made the game Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time. So I’ve started playing that now, and you know what? It’s actually kinda good. Feels a bit like a throwback to old school games, and you can even sense some of the Ninja Gaiden lineage in the combat. Much less demanding and intense though - granted I’m only playing on Normal difficulty. It’s not going to be a GOTY contender but I’d say it’s worth your time. I never watched the cartoon but they apparently got both the original creator and show writers as well as voice cast on board. Love the art style too and it’s had some cool levels thus far. Bosses have been decent, not too hard. Recommended if you need a short chill action game, and doubly so if you’re a Samurai Jack fan I assume.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 6 days ago:
Admittedly it’s been a while since I played D:OS2, but I enjoyed that combat system quite a lot. No random success chance felt good, the action economy was more interesting and the skills had more freedom and interesting effects because they didn’t have to stick to existing 5E material. Magic/physical armor was an interesting strategic factor to play around and combat mostly felt good - although yes, it did frequently and infamously devolve into elemental surface spam.
Writing wise it’s all still in the patented Larian tone, which is sometimes funny but frequently unserious and sort of Marvel-esque for better or worse. I didn’t mind it as much in DOS2, but I was quite a few years younger when I played it. The romance sucked in that game too but at least one positive is I don’t remember every companion throwing themselves at you in a pathetic display of wish fulfillment protagonist-sexuality writing like they do in BG3.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 6 days ago:
Ironically much like BG3, the third act of E33 is a mess. There is a ton of important side content with character moments and lore, particularly relating to Clea but also the whole Maelle relationship quest. But the pacing is completely off, it’s all presented as optional and it just feels very rushed. A “Definitive Edition” type patch or DLC that retools and restructures Act 3 would do E33 a world of good.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
Clair Obscur does technically have an NG+, though I’d say it’s less of a focus than in Souls games. There is, however, quite a bit of foreshadowing and pieces of the story that you won’t understand on your first playthrough but that hits different the second time through. I personally opted to consume it by watching others play after I completed my own first playthrough, but I’d say there is grounds enough for a second playthrough if that’s important to you.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
I have a lot of issues with the writing of the game in general, Act 3 is also very bad. It’s still a great game, it’s just that people frequently claim it’s the best game of all time and I think that’s overrating it.
- Comment on Kazeta: the new Linux-based physical media OS (my article!) 1 week ago:
I love it! I don’t know why but game cartridges always had a much better feel to them than disks to me. Could just be nostalgia for the times, though. But I recently dug out my 3DS and there is just something so satisfying about the click of inserting a game.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
Yeah, BG3 isn’t a truly branching path game in the way something like Witcher 2 for example is.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 week ago:
They’re very different games, in my opinion. If “bang for your buck” is most important then BG3 has objectively more content. It’s way longer, has way more side content and can support many playthroughs.
I think BG3 is a very good game, but it is not perfect and it is somewhat overrated. It’s a great game, but not the best game ever. It has a fair share of flaws, and while the writing is fine it’s still very much videogamey.
Expedition 33 is more of a work of art. It still has its problems too, but at all the critical points it delivers in spades. It’s got a great cast of characters, beautiful art direction and a story with resonant themes that will hit home with most people. Plus one of the best soundtracks of all time. It’s got fantastic presentation, some incredible set pieces and moments and phenomenal voice acting, direction and facial expressions. Even though the game is turn-based, the implementation of active elements like Parry and Dodge will feel very familiar to you coming from Elden Ring. In fact, one of the gameplay designers used to be a Sekiro speedrunner, and it shows.
From your frame of reference BG3 is more like Skyrim I’d say, in that it can almost be your “forever-game”. People put thousands of hours into it over dozens of playthroughs and it has a very vivid modding scene. Expedition 33 is all about that one, cinematic impactful playthrough. Maybe you play it a second time to pick up on foreshadowing and stuff like that.
For me personally I had a great time playing BG3, but I will eventually forget about it. I spent fewer hours in Expedition 33, but the experience will stay with me way longer.
- Comment on InfernoPlus - I ported Morrowind to Elden Ring 1 week ago:
This is absolutely insane. Move over Skyblivion, we have a new king in town.
- Comment on Piefed now has a built-in alternative to Lemmyverse to discover active communities, with the "Active people" filter on the communities page (weekly basis) 1 week ago:
No clue, sorry.
- Comment on Piefed now has a built-in alternative to Lemmyverse to discover active communities, with the "Active people" filter on the communities page (weekly basis) 1 week ago:
Oh I missed that somehow! I’ll subscribe just in case, but I agree with you that the functionality should ideally be built in to the software.