Sno

I didn't actually play the MH4u demo, but i don't imagine being thrown completely blind into mid-progression fights with canned item and gear loadouts is an especially good representation of what the game is actually about. I have no doubt that it was a confusing mess. However, I don't really buy the notion that you can go into a Souls game completely blind to its genre and reasonably be expected to figure out how everything works without an undue degree of trial and error, and in that sense, it's probably not as distant an experience from Monster Hunter as you're postulating it to be. If you really wanted to, MH4u is a game you could absolutely dive into blind and get going at the ground level, but you would miss crucial nuance in much the way you would miss nuance in the Souls games. The key difference is that i don't think Monster Hunter rewards that mindset with mystery, and playing Monster Hunter without any sense of direction will just... It will seem like a boring grind. In a Souls and Dota sliding scale, i think Monster Hunter probably actually sits pretty neatly in the middle. It has the mechanics of the former, with a mindset perhaps closer to the latter.

Super Metroid, definitely. Zero Mission is a great place to go after that though. The Prime Trilogy is also definitely worth digging into more. Super is where to start though.

I never really bothered trying to fight the rat covenant people in a straight up fight, it's so much easier to just go run the gauntlet as intended, and i've definitely gotten through a reasonable amount of times doing that. (Except for when somebody has gone the full distance to complete their instance of the gauntlet, then you're kind of fucked either way.) Also, yeah, the warped sword is a terrific dex weapon. Some great unique moves, good in powerstances, and it also holds up pretty well when infused, same as the barbed club. What are your feelings on the re-release, overall? Is it worth it?

You should totally play Other M.

I feel like the emphasis people put on reaction time as a reason why they can't play competitive games is a little misguided, you can get quite far with just a slightly different mindset. I definitely no longer benefit from youthful quickness, my reaction times are noticeably sluggish and terrible, but i've got other ways i can cope. I mean, I have friends who jump into a new game blind and do things on reaction that just astound me, the kind of stuff i was never able to do, but I never fail to make up the distance by instead trying to have a very present and nuanced understanding of the mechanics. Sort of have a little flowchart in my head so that i'm playing out on a series of canned responses to specific events i can recognize as pivotal moments, instead of trying to react to everything equally. I've been able to apply this thinking to most competitive games i play, and despite feeling like i'm handicapped by terrible reactions, i generally keep pace and do actually quite well. Competitive games are so much about getting in the head of the other player, reaction time only gets you so far. You might know the other player's optimal path to victory, but you don't know if they'll deviate from it for a less optimal strategy that might catch you off guard. Recognizing these strategies, recognizing the deviations from them, and knowing how to respond in any of those situations, that is far more valuable than that being able to click faster than the other player.

The Alonne fight definitely wants to be DS2's Artorias fight, and it's not quite there, but it's still a great boss. (He does have probably the best boss theme in the game though.)

First off: I hate trying to take the Metroid story at all seriously, because I never really got the impression from the games that there was any particularly cohesive picture shared between developers of what the universe of that series actually is, but if you want to read into it, it seemed to me that the Chozo had probably been in decline over a fairly long period of time. The different games all seem to present you with Chozo ruins in vastly different states of decay. Why did the Chozo adopt Samus? I took it to be simple decency, she was the sole survivor of a space pirate attack. As for the training and equipment they bestowed on her, i choose not to interpret it as them having any particular grand plans for Samus, but instead simply - as any caring parents would - trying to ensure that the child have access to as many advantages and benefits as she possibly could be afforded. Clearly, the universe of Metroid is a dangerous place.

I will strongly dispute a broad statement of the controls being terrible. It's a game with quite a sophisticated combo system and, almost like a fighting game, when you have a handle on it, you can do kind of incredible things. For a long, long time i had the impression of Monster Hunter being a slow and clunky game, it took some effort on my own end to reach the point where it "clicked" for me, and the game just suddenly seemed to move at a pace several magnitudes quicker and with far more precision. This is one of the bigger differences between Souls games and Monster Hunter games. A lot of the mechanics and tactics are very similar, but the base level demands are more approachable in the former, you can get quite far in Souls without a deep understanding of the combat mechanics, which i think is generally not as true in Monster Hunter. (Unless you're playing cooperatively and have people to prop you up, of course. Still, checking out some community created weapon tutorials on youtube is greatly encouraged.) The camera though, if you have access to either an n3DS or a Circle Pad Pro, it's basically not an issue. Most people won't, obviously, and the game's lock-on mechanic is purposefully primitive. (Trust me, it's something that makes sense with a few dozen hours in the game. It sounds like apologetic bullshit, but it legitimately is that way for a reason.) I'm sympathetic to this issue, i definitely understand that it's a barrier some people won't be able to cross. I'm not going to try and say that having some time with Souls will just magically make Monster Hunter not be an insane and impenetrable thing, that was not even my own experience. I had played multiple Monster Hunter games before MH4u and i ran the range from outright hating them to begrudgingly being dragged into it by friends, and it wasn't until coming at MH4u with a reference point in the Dark Souls games that i felt like i had a footing to build from. It was still a huge hill to climb, not in terms of sheer difficulty, but in the breadth of knowledge that needed to be acquired. The game finally dug its hooks in and i'm several hundred hours in on what will probably stand for me as one of the best experiences i've ever had with an action rpg. I don't really follow what you're saying here, can you elaborate?

I'll just say that it's a game that might surprise you, it gives you a pretty complex and very active toolbox of moves and, in typical Treasure fashion, seems to wildly reinvent itself every few levels. (The first S&P is fairly similar in these regards and is also really, really great.) I mean, but if you actively dislike the genre, it's probably a lost cause.

I'm just going to step in and champion the 3DS's Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate as a thing people should totally play if they like the Souls games for their boss fights and combat mechanics at least as much or perhaps more than for their world-building and exploration. (...Because, to be clear, there's none of that in Monster Hunter, but the underlying mechanics and the pacing of the fights will feel very familiar, and Souls games are for that reason a pretty good gateway into Monster Hunter, and MH4u is absolutely the best that series has ever been.) It's also something to play if you're a person who wishes the Souls games had a more functional and natural emphasis on co-operative play.

People should play this, it's a massive and ambitious rail shooter that i think just about anybody should be able to appreciate. I might even try to argue that it's one of Treasure's best games. I found the more explicitly anime-styled characters in Xenoblade much less off-putting, while Xenoblade X is hitting some serious uncanny valley effects for me. We're just going to have to agree to disagree.

Holy shit, Swery's XBO-exclusive adventure game "D4" is coming to PC. Confirmation. That's... Huh... That's one less reason to get an XBO, at least for me personally.

The changes they've made to Silencer have me wanting to dive back into the game, having a built-in movespeed slow accessible from the very start of a match is a wildly exciting prospect. People are responding to it like he's been nerfed because of the other changes the rework gave him, but they don't get it! They don't understand!

I think the environments look incredible, especially in the context of it allegedly being a seamless, streaming game world with a scale similar to a TES game. There is definitely some noticeable visual artifacts happening as terrain features pop between low-detail and high-detail variants, but the vastness and intricate detail in those environments more than makes up for it, i think. The character models, on the other hand, i think Monolith has missed the mark by quite a margin, there's some serious uncanny valley going on there. It seems similar to the aesthetic they've previously used in Xenosaga, and it still looks just terrible. As for animation and the lack of "heft" and polish, if you're talking about how the fights look, it's probably an inevitable result of it not being designed at all as an action RPG, but still being a real-time game. The first Xenoblade, at least, was a solid 80% about managing a taskbar of cooldowns. Those abilities branch out into tons of combos and statuses, but it's still basically all happening on that taskbar. (I'm not really doing the game justice, there's a lot of other mechanics and a big emphasis on positioning, but you probably get the idea. It's like an MMO, you're not dodging hitboxes.)

Since i'm pretty sure nobody knew about the Xenoblade X direct: I wants it.

That is just marvelous.

For all the problems i think Fusion has, i remember greatly enjoying playing through Fusion on its hard difficulty. It was pretty much the only time that series has ever been "challenging" in a way that didn't invoke speed-running, and in my recollection of it, at least, it even felt like a game that offered enough responsiveness and precision to support that kind of difficulty.

I also kept hearing this, that the hero mode offers a way more satisfying challenge for veteran players, but Nintendo's damned insistence on only offering difficulty options upon game completion put me in your exact situation, i didn't want to dive back in on what was a fairly lengthy game immediately after finishing it. Regardless, ALBW is pretty terrific, i feel.

If you want to play a caster, have the binoculars equipped to an off-hand slot and you can use them to first-person aim spells. I always meant to do a staff hexer, that always seemed like a fun build. (The soul costs for chime hexes, the other hand, seems pretty offputting.) Sorcery is pretty dull for a pve playthrough, but monstrous fun in pvp. (The most interesting sorceries offer psychological tricks and ways to game positioning in a pvp fight, but for pve, you're mostly just tossing out boring magic missiles.) Pyromancy became way more awesome with the addition of the Old Iron King pyromancies, definitely lots of fun now. (A pure pyromancer can be hard to manage though, due to relatively limited charges.) Miracles are very potent, but the best miracles are buffs, so it's probably the most difficult to do a pure caster with. (Seriously though, miracles are awesome.) Keep in mind: Sorcery scales with intelligence, miracles scale with faith, pyromancy scales with the sum of both, and hexes scale with whichever stat is lower. (That second last detail makes it actually pretty easy to mix pyromancy with anything else.) Playing a caster also completely changes what you look for in a melee weapon, and you will still have a melee weapon. Look for weapons with stats that don't just completely collapse in on themselves when infused with your caster element. The game doesn't follow clear rules with how infusion affects weapons, so just cycle through the possibilities before committing to things. As a general guideline though, base damage will be more valuable than scaling when you're looking to infuse. (And you will want to go with infused weapons as a caster, not just for the scaling elemental damage, but because spell enchanting gives a recursive benefit when applied to infused weapons of the same element. You can get monstrously powerful attacks out of that.) I used the puzzling stone sword a bunch in a dex-focused DLC-focused playthrough that i did in the normal game and while there was some oddity with how it reported its dex scaling versus the actual effect, it was still offering extremely good scaling. It's almost certainly one of the best dex weapons in that game, whether for bosses, pvp, or normal pve. (Be careful using the whip attacks in PVP, you will absolutely get parried if somebody is fishing for it. Instead, the two-handed r1 thrust has incredibly good tracking and range, and with the stone ring, it's easy to stun-lock anybody short of a havel's user. You also want to use that two-handed r1 thrust against bosses.) The Old Iron King area was probably my favorite of the DLC's when i played them in the normal game, and i'd argue it had among the best boss fights in the entire game.

It seems to me like trying to insert this business model into an existing community with an established culture and way of doing things is where Valve went the most wrong with all of this. There was a whole lot wrong with their approach though. They said they wanted to encourage more large-scale mod projects, but there's a compelling argument that i saw made repeatedly that exactly the opposite would have happened. Those big mods exist because they're built up other whole other existing projects, not just the base game, and also because of the work of often unaccounted for volunteers who drift in and out of a project over exceptionally long periods of time. Attribution, in this context, becomes messy and rather loose and is already a point of contention in many mod communities. If you throw money into the mix and make it so everybody needs to get their proper share of it, the headache involved will probably actually cause such big mods to not exist in the first place, you might end up seeing more superficial solo projects instead. (The exact opposite of what Valve's stated goal was.) Also, it doesn't seem to me that there's anything wrong with Bethesda taking a portion of the profits from mod sales when - after all is said and done - those mods are built up on their work. (You could also argue that it would have provided more incentive to Bethesda to not break mod compatibility.) Obviously though, the precise share of those profits was a conversation that needed to happen before this thing went live. There were also, in an incredibly short span of time, just multitudes of ways the system was being exploited in gross ways. People selling projects they had nothing to do with, modders implementing pop-ups in free versions to advertise paid versions, and all kinds of appalling price gouging. Many of those people may have actually not been doing those things in earnest, but as a form of protest against the system, and it definitely highlighted many of the flaws present. That service was not as thoroughly considered as many of Valve's Steam experiments have been. Kudos to Valve for being willing to back pedal and not just doubling down on it, though i imagine this experiment will resurface again at some other point in the future. Just look at what Valve does with their own games, they're clearly very interested in helping community members monetize their work. Other news: What the fuck is going on with Konami? It really does seem like we're watching that company implode.

I've read that the 60fps durability bug will allegedly be fixed in an upcoming patch. From apparently didn't mean to ignore it for the re-release, it just somehow slipped through still intact. Nevertheless, kind of ridiculous that a widely known issue like that from the PC version ended up in all three versions of the re-release.

This is really, really true. Majora really does go kind of nuts with its traversal mechanisms in a way that very few of the other Zelda games have approached. It gives you exciting and interesting abilities and doesn't rein them in with rigid contextual activation, but instead gives you big open spaces to let you properly play around. Zelda, at its worst, seems afraid of that, afraid to give you anything too significant or unusual, and tends to end up restricting such tools to the point of being glorified door keys. More than that, it seems quite strongly implied that the spirit of the Deku Butler's son is what Link found himself initially possessed by, and is the restless spirit that is healed to become the Deku Mask.

I figured i should probably stick these in the actual Majora thread.

Some of the food combos give you skills that boost gathering actions. There are tool tips in the game that will reveal which ones they are and what they do. I don't remember what the exact food/prep combinations are, there's several possibilities.

Apparently the original game did still have the journal, it's just been expanded upon for this release, so yeah, there's that. (Some puzzle solutions and quest rewards have also been shuffled around a bit, apparently.) I'm still really, really impressed with the game. I'm a little further in, and i feel no reluctance in saying that it's easily still one of my favorite Zelda games. I'm so impressed with the way it strings you along in elaborate quest chains that are filled out with all these implicit checkpoints whenever you discover a new travel point or learn a song or get a major item unlock, all of which are set up to give you natural opportunities to go back in time and reset the clock so you can tackle the remainder of the quest more safely. What's so impressing me about that is the way those quests are designed so these break points can function logically and mechanically within the narrative and scripting of a given quest when you move to interject yourself back into the middle of a reset quest from all kinds of weird angles. Kind of makes my mind reel thinking about it, it feels like there's an insane number of variables for a designer to have kept track of. Also noticing a lot more in the way of subtle thematic and narrative detail, especially in the clocktown quests, but kind of all over the game. (This is a superficial one, but everybody always seems to interpret the moon as being a malevolent force in this game's story, but it seemed immediately apparent to me this time that it's grimacing in pain as it's pulled along in an unwilling descent by Majora's Mask. I mean, the game makes the point several times that the moon is casting down teardrop-shaped meteorites from its eyes. I don't really know how i, and apparently a bunch of people, missed that the first time around.) It's also relatively thin on hand-holding compared to Ocarina and the games that followed. That's kind of wonderful. It looks terrific too, it goes a little further than Ocarina did with the visual upgrades, but a lot of it also owes to the presentation in Majora having already been more thoughtful and stylized. (Cutscenes, even simple dialogue scenes, are filled with nuanced little flourishes. I actually looked up videos of the original game to make sure i wasn't ascribing something new to the original, but Majora 3D is reproducing those details faithfully.) Majora's Mask is fuckin` great, you guys.