AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Tokyo Mirage Sessions update: still really good

I got off my butt and downloaded the MHX demo and went ahead and downloaded the demo for Etrian Odyssey 4 since it popped up first

After playing through the demo a bit it has suddenly roped me in and now I need 10 bucks of ecash to get it it's on sale SOMEONE GIVE ME cheddar no wait don't actually I'll get it myself I'm an adult I swear

ShellShock Live is so awesome you should ALL GET IT.

I've watched gameplay for Gundam game series such as Extreme Versus and Gundam Breaker and while the core ideas of both are great, I would much rather play a more "grounded" title set in the Gundam franchise. Something more tense and rooted in the "War is Hell" half of Gundam, some sort of high-lethality tactical shooter based around the kind of gameplay you'd find in the older Ghost Recon games with some robot-limb-severing "brutality" taken from Gears of War if you manage to get up close to an enemy.

Setting could range from going prone in a forest with whole trees as your bushes for cover and carefully picking your shots, dense cities with destructible buildings that either you or your foes could cut through, and omni-directional space battles where you duck behind asteroids and old wreckage as your saving grace when huge battleships train their sights on you.

What do y'all think about that?

I haven't played any Gundam games, but I've played Zone of the Enders which was pretty cool. I'd like to play something like that again.

Man the music videos in Tokyo Mirage Sessions are so good, Nintendo and Atlus really went all out with this game. I really hope it gets a sequel somewhere down the line because man, it's fun.

I went and bought Etrian Odyssey 4 and oh god why is this so fun

WHY DOES IT HURT SO GOOD

I like the concept of MMO games, but they all seem to have the exact same kind of gameplay mechanics and never seem to move on beyond "the system that works".

Specifically, I'm talking about Persistent World MMO games where the game runs in a large open world that constantly active when not being played. Other MMOs that try to separate from the norm use a boring instance system that doesn't promote spontaneous player interaction while locking players inside a bubble separated from the rest of the universe while they do stuff that may as well have been a single-player game with a co-op feature.

A long time ago, it was the norm to move around and click enemies to activate an auto combat thing while occasionally pressing hotkeys until something died. Nowadays, you often have some fancy over-the-shoulder camera and aim around, but you're still doing exactly the same things in most of the current MMO games with the difference being that you have to manually track mobs while spamming the attack button. It's the same as before, but it just has fancier animations and requires you to needlessly spam the same input over and over until you either kill all the things or develop carpel tunnel syndrome.

And then you have the MMOs that claim to be something different. However, this idea of "different" is essentially "this game is exactly like all the other ones, but we have these other systems that do things in the background and the actual game still runs off the same mechanics that have been used for two decades." Sure, your skill progression and character development has different features from the norm, but you're still waiting for skill cooldowns while wearing down on enemy HP and making sure your own HP doesn't hit zero. You still have the hit-trading until things die, the skill that draws aggro, the skill that temporarily stuns things, the skill that moves the player next to something else, and the skill that hits everything in a wide area while everything is trying to win a battle of attrition.

The only thing that makes those kinds of games interesting is the player interaction, but so many games these days have no idea what socializing is and don't really incentivize it in any way (not to mention there's rarely any non-combat activities in many games that doesn't boil down to "talk to this other person while crafting"). They often lack meaningful player interaction outside of instanced dungeons, and many, many games decided to follow the route of making a given player an unstoppable force that weaves through waves and waves of lesser foes.

And this is without even trying to get started in talking about class-specific stuff.



The one MMO I actually cared for and played for six years started off with an interesting concept: The players had unlimited freedom, lots of field content to perform gathering and crafting activities, and dungeons that had enemies that would overwhelm lone warriors due to pitting the player against tough odds and underwhelming character power. It was a point/click gameplay type, but its systems very much disapproved of trying to play it like other MMOs in that players had very limited health pools and had to learn to use the game's system of every attack (including basic normal attacks) having an effect on an invisible bar that determined whether a given entity was stunned or knocked over, and this invisible bar affected the player characters as well. As such. trying to face-tank five enemies with your 85 HP was a death sentence.

There was no class system, no skill limitations and no real defined idea of what you were supposed to do. Instead, you had to individually raise skills to use them well, so you could either be the Jack of All Trades and try to manage magic, archery and swordsmanship while also trying to put together potions, craft weapons and armor, and butcher the strings on your lute. OR, you could specialize, become a sage, sniper or a knight, focus entirely on being the greatest smith, dedicate yourself to being a very effective healer to keep people alive, or become the life of the party by becoming the greatest of bards and write your very own music to be played by your personal band who is also performing the very instrument tracks that you composed. Dungeons almost required the player to put in an ungodly amount of time into the game to breeze through it, or build up a circle of friends by interacting with others and then forming an unstoppable alliance that could use actual tactics (playing without organization actually fought against the party) to work together and overcome all the challenges (not to say playing solo at low levels was impossible; a given player could run through the whole game alone with novice-level unranked skills as long as they understood the game systems and managed their stamina/mana properly).

Then, they changed the dev team's director and someone took over who hated the game specifically because it didn't play like other popular games. He decided to start a series of "improvements" where they gutted all the game systems and tried to make it play like World of Warcraft or whatever. The unique systems in the game started getting replaced with features that instead said "here, kill this stuff faster!" The deliberate, well-thought actions the players once had to perform became inefficient as characters quickly grew to a level of power that made the game meta fell into a race for power that rewarded the player with the ability to stomp over high-end content with the addition of high-DPS, rapid attack skills that activated instantly. And then the old system of having to properly time skill usage was replaced with something more akin to other games, no longer having to prepare an action and instead being able to do things instantly with a cooldown on the end. Character progression ended up being revamped, allow people to maximize a skillset in a couple of months and moving on to become a master of something else, having the old system dedicating a character for different playstyles with a handful of select skills that did well become a poor idea to stick to.

The next few years, the social aspects of the game started to die as everyone became almost completely self-sufficient and no longer had any true incentive to work with other players.


It started following the trends set by all the other popular games, people gradually stopped socializing, and then it lost almost all of its old charm that made is such a memorable experience.



I have no idea how to keep my points short and concise. I just needed to rant and didn't have anyone to listen to me. Sorry for dropping a wall of text on your toes, people.

I got over 50 hours in Witcher 3 already and haven't even really scratched the surface yet. This game is insane.

Evolve Stage 2 is pretty fun. I've always wanted to play it before despite all the DLC shenanigans and now that I have the chance it's excellent. I especially love being the monster.

I have to say, people do need to learn that they need to head off the monster though. Most of the time when I play Hunter people just follow the tracks or the Planetary Scanner, instead of trying to cut the monster off.

The Arc came out on RuneScape.

It's pretty.

I bought Starbound. It's pretty fun.

Is it enough like Terraria 2.0 that I should get it?

I see a lot of negative reviews on Steam, but those are mostly from Early Access players that are disappointed in the changes, or feel like the devs promised more content, it seems. I'm guessing the devs want to keep updating it though, so maybe those complaints will go away over time.

It recently went into version 1.0, and it seems pretty cool. I would probably have gotten it if I didn't have it already.

I played Starbound before the recent update and really liked it. After the update though, I get insane lag while playing it. Not fps drops or anything, but like I'll attack a monster, the hit won't register, then I'll take damage and the monster will teleport behind me because it apparently hit me. Makes the game pretty much unplayable for me right now. Thought it was just my internet because I saw it first in multiplayer, but it happens in single player as well. The game is fun, but it's not fun enough for me to want to spend hours getting it to work properly.