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Video Games General

Had an absolutely fucking epic mission in UFO: Enemy Unknown (a.k.a. the original X-Com).

Superhuman difficulty. Sectoid terror mission, at night. I had 14 soldiers, laser rifles, mind probes, one small launcher with 5 shots, no armour, no psi-screening, and no idea when to quit.

Mission started in an iffy fashion, then rapidly went down the toilet when one soldier got mind-controlled and gunned down four others, causing everyone to panic. I was fairly-quickly reduced to two soldiers. One of these was the woman carrying the Small Launcher. She'd already taken down one Cyberdisc with the Small Launcher, and had taken a shot at the Sectoid Leader once I identified it via Mind Probe, but missed. Then she panicked and dropped the Small Launcher before running off. The other soldier was the aforementioned mind-controllee. Looked pretty grim, since there was another Sectoid and a Cyberdisc still there to deal with.

Then the Small Launcher lady recovered from her panic. I guided her back over to her discarded weapon, and stunned the Sectoid Leader. Then reloaded and shot down the Cyberdisc. Then shot the last Sectoid, but it didn't take - neither did two hits with a Laser Rifle from the recovered mind-controllee - low damage rolls indeed! Then the last Sectoid shot the mind-controllee, leaving me with only one soldier - and, if you've been keeping track, she'd just run out of ammo. So I had her run over to the nearest X-Com casualty, drop her empty Small Launcher, pick up their Laser Rifle, and gun down the final Sectoid to complete the mission.

2czpkw.png


(the one capture is the Sectoid Leader, making all this pain worthwhile; the extra alien corpse is because "stunned" Cyberdiscs are corpses but not kills while killed Cyberdiscs, which explode, are kills but not corpses)

Now that's what I call a hard fight.
 
WHAT THE SHIT.

Torrance, Calif., – February 14, 2018 – XSEED Games, the independent-minded publishing brand of Marvelous USA, Inc., today announced that The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II is now available worldwide for Windows PC with a 10% launch week discount on Steam, GOG, and the Humble Store by Humble Bundle. After the promotion, the game will return to its regular selling price of $39.99, €39.99, and £29.99. This compelling tale has been expanded with 50% more voiced lines from the original English cast, and an even more personalized experience awaits owners of the first titleTrails of Cold Steel on PC through the usage of existing save files to access special dialogue options reflecting the player's previous choices. As a special bonus exclusively for those who have purchased any Trails in the Sky title on PC, an Estelle and Joshua costume set will be available as a free download to players with one of those titles in their library.
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I've been watching the news for a release date for ToCS2 since I finished the first game in freaking October and now I find out they pulled a Sega Saturn and announced the launch date on the launch date?!

Except no, on further research apparently they announced it two weeks ago when I was neck deep in work problems and could have used some good news like that. Which isn't much better but now who the fuck cares the wait is over and just in time for the weekend!
 
Smuthunter said:
WHAT THE SHIT.



I've been watching the news for a release date for ToCS2 since I finished the first game in freaking October and now I find out they pulled a Sega Saturn and announced the launch date on the launch date?!

Except no, on further research apparently they announced it two weeks ago when I was neck deep in work problems and could have used some good news like that. Which isn't much better but now who the fuck cares the wait is over and just in time for the weekend!
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What is that?

A JRPG?
 
Rexis12 said:
What is that?

A JRPG?
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A really fucking good JRPG in a series of also really great JRPGs, yeah. XSEED has been doing PC ports of the Trails series for a few years now; they were originally PSP and PSVita games so I never got the chance to play them until recently. Their ports are also really good too, XSEED shelled out extra cash to round up the voice actors and get extra English dialogue recorded for both of the Cold Steel games and incorporated a "turbo mode" feature in the first one to let you accelerate the game's clock speed for when you want to blitz through running around town or skip dialogue at warp speed or whatever.

Cold Steel 1 also ended on a huge cliffhanger so I've been chomping at the bit to get my hands on the second game ever since I finished it. I wrote a review of Cold Steel 1 earlier in this thread, I'm pretty sure... yeah, it's this one.
 
My brother has been playing the older games of the series on PC and they are all for sale on Steam right now till February 19 so this Monday.
 
And on top of that, we don't just get Octolings in Splatoon... No, we get a goddamn Octoling story mode as DLC.
 
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Fuuuuucking hell, the Secret Of Mana Remake just feel WRONG. First time I've ever returned a game on Steam. Definitely not worth its current price.
 
CptTagon said:
Played less than two hours and bought it two weeks ago. Fairly generous, really. I'm sure there's some indie games you could blow through in that time frame.
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When you consider tech issues not that generous. You can easily spend that much time just trying to get a game to run. Add in that for major games it is easy to make the first hour of gameplay highly polished, and the other hour cutscenes and games can get away with ripping you off fairly easy with only 2 hours of playtime.

Personally I think a better way to do it would be to require the developers to list the estimated play time to complete the game, then give you 10-20% of that depending on the length. So a 60 hour game you would have 6 hours to return it (10% because it is fairly long), while a 3 hour indie game you would have 1 hour to return it instead (20% because it is really short). Naturally this gameplay length the devs list would have to be visible to the public, preferably with the ability to sort/search games based on it in the steam shop.
 
I know some of my steam games have 1 hour on their playtime even though I've never played them. Somehow.
 
Two hours isn't a hard limit. If you're not returning a game every week, they have leeway.
 
Found a fix for the xbox1 gamepad mapping in binary domain.

Wait until the game reaches the start menu(where is says press the start button) and then turn on your controller.

Then I also learned that the AI of the game that is called big bro is frankly a dumbass that won't open doors no matter how many times you smash a crate into a giant robot if you miss opening the doors the first time you do it.

That doesn't bold well for the future.

-edit-

And I still have no fucking idea on how to throw a hand grenade.
 
OverReactionGuy said:
I know some of my steam games have 1 hour on their playtime even though I've never played them. Somehow.
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Steam's pkaytime stats have always been a little wonky. I can start a game through Steam that has a launcher/patcher and despite only having the launcher open and patching, Steam counts all that as play time. I've had games I've never managed to get running at all with playtime listed on Steam. Games that open and instantly crash somehow register to Steam as a minute of play.
 
Monster Hunter World makes me really hate it sometimes.

I just had a fight with Nergigante which was going pretty well until two guys got wiped simultaneously by his stupid dive-bomb attack. We got him down to low health, chased him back to his nest, planted 7 or 8 bombs right by his head and set them all off and he must have been on his last legs when he suddenly did some kind of weird spin attack I didn't see coming that killed me from, like, 3/4 of a maxed out health bar. Bam, quest over just like that.
 
Well, this is something.

I thought I'd check out runescape again after a very long time but apparently my account was banned for macroing...in 2018.

I have not touched runescape in like 10 to 15 years and all I did was mine some mithral, decided I was bored and stop completely.

So that says that a hacker used my old account recently. Thankfully, I changed passwords on everything multiple times so they can't touch my email or anything.

But I would never knew about this if I didn't get curious about runescape again. Now I wonder how my old ragnarok accounts are going but I don't need to.

The private servers I've used probably died.

Just thought this was mildly amusing to find out.
 
So I finally got around to finishing Xenoblade 2. It was kind of anti-climactic unfortunately, I was over-leveled for the final boss so I beat it pretty handily on the first go and didn't even get KO'd more than once or twice. What's worse, I was spoiled on the ending so it didn't have much emotional impact, although Poppi's role in things was a bit of a tear-jerker.

It's rare for me to finish a game, especially an 80-plus hour JRPG, so I'll share a few of my thoughts:

First, the ending.

How the hell did Pyra and Mythra spontaneously come back from death in two separate bodies? Don't get me wrong, I'm not upset that they're alive, but can I get some kind of explanation please? Rex did have their core crystal but it was inert when Aion exploded, which means they should have lost their memories after being killed like any other blade.

As I said above, Poppi's role in things was the one part of the ending that got me tearing up. "That below belt!" yeah no kidding, and the way she's even more excited to see them come back than freaking Rex is just.... mmmph, I love Poppi in general, she's an adorable little titanium cinnamon bun. I kept using Tora even after Morag joined the party just because it kept Poppi in the party.

On the subject of Rex: I have mixed feelings on him. I was kind of consistently annoyed throughout the game by his kid hero-ness. Yeah I get that XC2 is more optimistic than the previous games and I don't begrudge it that at all but Rex lived down to the cliche of being optimistic to the point of naivete often enough that it was a hard impression to shake even after he started getting character development. The way he can belt out the cheesiest lines unironically just makes things worse. If you ever thought Shulk's "really feelin' it" battle line was a meme, I'd be amazed if Rex's "We'll beat them with the power of friendship!" isn't an even bigger one.

I've said it before in the video game rants thread but I don't think I've said it here: I really fucking hate the random draw system for rare blades. I've been trying to get KOS-MOS since I started the game and 100+ hours later she continues to elude me. Using legendary and rare cores doesn't seem to help at all, it's just common blades all day every day.

Probably the single biggest annoyance with the gameplay that wasn't related to acquiring new blades would be the way field skills work. Needing to swap blades around in your party to get just the right combination of skills together so you can open a door and then immediately going back in and resetting your party for combat was probably the most consistently annoying thing in the whole game. Put these two together and I think the game would have been significantly improved if they scrapped common blades altogether, got rid of the random draw system and had all the rare blades be collectible through sidequests and bonus boss battles, and then just have the skill pool be based on your entire crew of blades, not just the ones you have equipped.

Overall though I'd call it a pretty solid 9/10. I enjoyed a lot more of it than I disliked at any point, and I liked it enough that I finished it and immediately jumped back in to play a few more hours of post-game content instead of running back to Trails of Cold Steel 2.
 
So, less than a week before Death End Re;Quest get released in Japan. What do I learn from another gameplay video? That no worry, the main character guy that support the heroine trapped in the game can also get himself and his friends brutally murdered. Equal opportunities for all for bad ends!

Edit: Screencap from video to show it.
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Man, the story in this better not be a flop. I can easily endure average gameplay for the story alone if needed.
 
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Megaolix said:
So, less than a week before Death End Re;Quest get released in Japan. What do I learn from another gameplay video? That no worry, the main character guy that support the heroine trapped in the game can also get himself and his friends brutally murdered. Equal opportunities for all for bad ends!

Edit: Screencap from video to show it.
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Man, the story in this better not be a flop. I can easily endure average gameplay for the story alone if needed.
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I have this strange feeling that the first bad end is simply not moving (for X time) from your starting position...
 
So I was at Anime Central this past weekend and out of the clear blue found a copy of Super Robot Wars X at an imported games booth. As it happens, Banpresto recently started packaging English translations directly into the Japanese copies of the last two or three games they've put out, starting with The Moon Dwellers a few years ago, but I had completely forgotten this until I saw the games on display.

So now for the first time ever I'm playing a translated console SRW game after spending the last 15-ish years staring longingly at Youtube videos of attack animations from the previous games. And I have to say, it is a sweet feeling. I'm told that X has some problems in having lazy worldbuilding or having recycled assets from the Z series or something like that but I couldn't care less, this game is pure fucking magic.
 
Smuthunter said:
As it happens, Banpresto recently started packaging English translations directly into the Japanese copies of the last two or three games they've put out
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Can I just say that this is fucking awesome.
Raven1138 said:
I'm sorry to say that Total Biscuit has passed away from cancer this evening. He is survived by his wife Gemma Bain and stepson Orion Bain.
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I'm not a fan of TB. I don't hate him, either. I guess my feelings would be meh.

But nobody deserves cancer. Doubly so at 33.

RIP man.
 
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