Sno

Okay, so i'm not the only one noticing this then. Also, for those of you playing on keyboard and mouse, keep in mind that while the game maps wasd for running, it maps the arrow keys separately for walking. It's useful for finessing your position to make sure you're properly behind cover, since the level geometry actually does matter in this game. (It's not like Firaxis' X-com.) Crouching or crawling in "cover" only makes you immune to critical damage from headshots, it doesn't confer any other defensive bonuses. Well, crawling in tall grass also seems to make your unit harder to detect. Anyways, the arrow keys are also a good way to fine-tune your facing at the end of your unit's turn. Facing does matter, your units get an evasion chance if they're attacked by a unit they can see, and they can't overwatch against enemies that sneak up behind them. Valid sight over a target is also a requirement for participation in coordinated attacks allowed by a unit's relationship bonuses. (It should be noted that the "vision" range for all of these effects is quite short.) And since it's a new page, i'll reiterate an important thing: The rate of fire units have in overwatch is allegedly derived from the game's framerate, so if you're playing with that 30fps lock off, you're having an unintended experience. Movement physics for the tanks also apparently break down in a big way at higher framerates, among other framerate-related oddities.

The PC version also has something like four DLC packs from the PS3 game just built-in. - This is really bothering me too, if the game is going to make me watch a ton of cutscenes, it should at least let me just sit back comfortably instead of having to fiddle with the event selection screen every thirty seconds. - Unless we're talking about different things, you can. When you're placing down troops in the deploy screen, you can cycle through multiple pages of info on each of them with Q and E on the keyboard and the bumpers on the gamepad. (It's weird seeing Xbox 360 gamepad prompts all over a formerly PS3 exclusive game.) - I'm having a different kind of issue. Any positional audio during the battles, like gunshots or explosions or random battle chatter, is incredibly quiet relative to the music, cutscene dialogue, and menu pings. Edit: So interception fire, the overwatch-like mechanic that has both your own and opposing units fire on any visible enemies in a movement phase, the rate of fire is apparently determined by the framerate. So yeah... If you're playing with an unlocked framerate as opposed to that intended 30fps cap... Yeah...

GX is still my favorite racing game all these years later, it just destroys me that the franchise has seemingly been buried by Nintendo, though if they're all of a sudden willing to do this much with it, maybe a revival isn't out of the possibility. Also: Amiibos. I don't know whether to post in the 3DS thread, the Smash thread, or this thread... Shulk's Amiibo will be the first retailer exclusive, you'll only be able to get him at Gamestop. Frankly, i'm surprised he's getting an Amiibo, i assume it just means every playable Smash 4 character is getting an Amiibo. Maybe it'll do something for Xenoblade Chronicles X, or the Xenoblade Chronicles port for New 3DS. (New 3DS has a built-in NFC sensor, right?) Even Megaman is going to get an Amiibo, and the way Capcom has been about that character lately, i can't think of anything other than Smash 4 that might theoretically use him.

A lot of it mostly affects how PVP interacts with the game, like the improved netcode and a less-borked covenants system that makes more sense in the meta of Dark Souls. (There are still some problems though, particularly in the way the two main covenants are handled.) The existence of numerous new ways to tilt fights in the favor of the poor pve sap being hassled by an invader is also appreciated and is important for the overall meta, because invaders really risk nothing and basically always have the advantage, them generally coming in fresh from a bonfire with a pvp-focused build. Weapons are also generally much more balanced in DS2, leading to an incredibly diverse array of builds in use. (There were a few major exceptions that have been pretty heavily nerfed.) Magic still seems to be a controversial spot among DS2 players, but i think it's generally handled better in DS2 than it was in DS1. I think the mechanics of the core stats are much improved, everything can be useful and choices upon leveling up are more difficult. Back-stabbing is much, much harder to pull off in pvp, it isn't the de facto strategy as it was in DS1. You see people using the full range of mechanics in the game, it makes pvp fights feel almost like you're just playing a good fighting game. I also love the way DS2 handles successive playthroughs, gradually introducing more complex enemy layouts and more items through those successive playthroughs, instead of just bumping up the difficulty. (Playing through to at least NG+ is strongly encouraged.) Also, while the boss fights in DS2 don't quite reach the same highs the bosses in the first game hit, there is no boss fight in DS2 that is as bad as the worst boss fights in DS1 were. (Bed of Chaos and Ceaseless Discharge stand out in my mind as fights that just feel unfinished.) I mean, but then there's still the things the first game definitely does better, like the areas and enemies being more diverse and visually interesting. I also felt that there was enough story conveyed in the first game that you could more or less figure out the plot details on your own without seeking outside guidance. It's very subtle, it weirdly requires you to dive into reading item descriptions and infer things from the environment, but it's basically all in there and you can piece it together yourself. Dark Souls 2, on the other hand, is needlessly opaque about certain crucial elements of its story, and in many cases there just isn't much of one to begin with. There are important chunks of its narrative that simply do not exist anywhere in the game. (Certainly not in the environments, which are - with only a few exceptions - much more nakedly just "levels" to play through, or are otherwise self-contained narratives separate from the rest of the game.) The DLC fleshes out a lot of surrounding details in a really cool way, but offers no answers for the core questions the main story leaves you with. (Recent information seems to suggest that Dark Souls 2 may have been the victim of a very clunky localization though.)

There are definitely a handful of fighting games that have really great netcode, ArcSys's games always stand out to me, but it's obviously a pretty tremendous hurdle to overcome. With regards to the 3DS version of Smash 4, the conditions online seem to have actually improved a fair bit over time. Based on how Namco had provided low-latency multiplayer for their own fighting games, my suspicion is that the online play for Smash 4 is built up on a dedicated server infrastructure, and now that we're out past the launch rush for the game, that things have eased up considerably on it. Four player matches can still be rough, but two and three player matches have often been going off without a hint of lag. I still run into people with bad connections in random matches of course, but against friends - from all over the continent, to be clear - with reliable connections, it's been pretty smooth sailing. With these same friends, fights played closer to the game's release were often a total mess. The first few days were pretty solid, but the online play deteriorated rapidly and stayed that way for a few weeks before recovering.

Dark Souls 2 has kind of been the only thing i've been playing lately. Bought that DLC and played through it on my main character and thought it was great. Thought it was so good and lended just enough of the right things to the overall experience that i started up a new character to do a full NG playthrough alongside the DLC, and having done that i'm now back to fiddling around with my NG++ main. I like Dark Souls 2 an awful, awful lot. Yet, if somebody wanted to argue with me that the first game was better, i wouldn't disagree, there's valid arguments there and i agree with a lot of them. Still, i have played more of Dark Souls 2 at this point, and i want to keep playing Dark Souls 2. Dark Souls presents a more interesting place to explore with more nuanced narratives embedded throughout, but Dark Souls 2 has so many small mechanical improvements that i don't think i could step back from. It's something that's been in the back of my mind while playing the game, and i'm sure it's something that happens often with a lot of players and a lot of games. You know, for example, I still think Morrowind is the best TES game, but i don't think i could go back to it at this point. Anyways, that's a random thought. Certainly not a new thought, but it's been fairly front and center for me for the last little while. You know, that the game you consider the best, and the game you most want to play, don't always line up. Perhaps it's that difference between a game eliciting an emotional response through world building and story telling, and eliciting a sort of mechanical appreciation with really tightly designed systems.

So this was just updated with a new character, a new arena, some more music, and taunts for all the characters. There might be more in there that i didn't notice, but those were the things that stood out to me. It is still an awesome game that people should totally play.

About the head-tracking system they implemented to make sure the 3D doesn't "break", does it work in low light conditions? Is there also any noticeable lag to the tracking, do you notice any delay as it tries to keep up with your head movements?

So is this a good jumping-on point for people who didn't play the original version, or is it just made to be uber difficult to appease long-time fans?

So the next patch will include balance updates. This, apparently, will also break compatibility with any saved replays, which i find fairly upsetting.

Valkyria Chronicles' PC port just went up on Steam, the buzz seems to be that it's a decent port.

So there's a crafting system, in a fashion, where you can combine two items and have a preview of what the result will be, and the result will generally inherit some attributes from both parent items. The more weapons you have collected, the more you can play around to try and find different resulting weapons. You can't just endlessly improve an item though, because the crafting generally results in an average of the two, so you have to keep playing on harder and harder difficulties to obtain better base items to work from. Still, if you play through on a high difficulty and end up with a powerful item with terrible attributes, you can combine it with a lot of your weaker items that feature good attributes to try and finagle things so you end up with a really strong weapon that also has the attributes you want it to have. It's a cool system. As for the stand, if you have played any d-pad & stylus FPS games on either the 3DS or the DS, you more or less know what the control will be and are also probably acclimated to that control enough that it won't kill your hands to just hold the system yourself. So if you're okay with controls like that, you probably don't need the stand. Frankly though, i think the stand is actually kind of nice to have, it's a nice place to just put the 3DS down during any game without losing sight of the screen, but it's definitely kind of superfluous.

I still think Ocarina 3D is a clunky port, but... I guess it's a matter of minutia. People always shout me down when i try to talk about that. If you've never played Ocarina, or if you really love Ocarina, Ocarina 3D is a very nice looking version of what is still a really great and really important game. Kid Icarus Uprising, on the other hand, is a game i personally really love, but... it definitely helps to know what you're getting into, which is that it's a third-person shooter with an initially awkward control scheme and a big emphasis on what is actually a really well handled loot grind. The campaign is fairly long and the story is surprisingly full of charm and knowing reference, but if you just zip through it on a low difficulty and call it a day, you might not feel like you've gotten all that much out of it, it's built to be replayed multiple times. (Lots of hidden areas, a very broad difficulty slider, a surprisingly deep loot system, and even incidental lines of dialogue that actually randomly cycle through variations on subsequent playthroughs as just a small way to keep things seeming fresh.)

The world of Xenoblade Chronicles X is allegedly five times as large as all of the playable space in Xenoblade Chronicles, how's that for scale? I did a near 100% run on Xenoblade Chronicles with around 170 hours in the game and it's rightly earned a spot as one of my favorite RPG's. Definitely excited for the follow up, though that real dumb Nintendo put out for Xenoblade Chronicles X gave me some pause. (How do you like "BLADE: Beyond the Logos Artificial Destiny Emancipator" as an acronym?)

The single-player stuff they've started showing off for Splatoon looks surprisingly awesome. That game, in general, has been quite a surprise, it just looks like such a fun time. I am so deeply wounded by this. "Show me your moves!" on the billboard is pretty great though. Seriously though, Nintendo, come on. It's been too long.

Every time a new CoD comes out, there's talk of some new "thing" about it that makes me consider for a few moments whether or not i want to dive back in before assuring myself that it's still going to be a CoD game and that i'm probably still going to hate it. The thing is, i have a particular love for elaborate mobility-boosting gameplay mechanisms such as what is promised by this newest reboot for the series, so I am finding myself perilously close to giving CoD another chance. I will pose a question: Is the campaign still deeply based in very linear and inflexible scenarios with barely-there enemy AI as CoD tends to be? Is it still, at its core, CoD? Obviously the online progression is still going to be there, and i don't like that either, but i probably wouldn't end up playing it a bunch online anyways.

You know, I'm going to throw some more in here... ... Since Lovely Planet is kind of wonderful. ... And this, because i've had Smash 4's new menu theme stuck in my head for weeks.

Also, seriously, more people should play Lethal League. It's awesome.

There are some really great boss themes in the Dark Souls 2 add-ons.

I thought the benefits from humanities capped at 30, so i had to go and confirm some information for myself and ended up finding some contradictory information from different wikis. Chaos weapon buffs definitely cap at 10, item discovery may cap at either 10 or 30, and curse resistance either caps at 30 or keeps going past that. People at least seem pretty firmly agreed on the physical defense and magic/lightning/fire resistance buffs increasing almost linearly until the carry limit of 99. Also, dark hand attacks, like the ones the darkwraiths use, are the other way you can lose humanities. Anyways, that's kind of taking things off topic, i guess. In LotF, I understand you can also resupply at checkpoints without resetting enemy spawns, just as long as you don't spend your experience? That seems sort of crazy, like it kind of breaks one of the fundamental elements of the Souls formula. I guess they want you to be able to resupply without burning off your multiplier, but if you could reset spawns on top of that, you'd too easily be able to farm up a multiplier.

Very interesting, especially considering that i would have said that Witcher 2 was probably the western RPG with the combat system that, prior to this, most felt like it had been somewhat inspired by the Souls games. I mean, it sounds like it's at least functionally similar, right? The choice with humanities is that you can spend them to kindle a bonfire or restore to human or whatever, or you can keep them in your active stock and gain passive benefits from them, but at the risk of losing them when you die. Admittedly though, the system never really worked out that way, humanities are too rare and important to risk on running around with large stocks of active humanities for the relatively small passive buffs they can offer. Still, it was a good idea, and if LotF can take that and retool it to the point where it works out, that's kinda cool. Are you sure about that? I understand it's so slavish in emulating Dark Souls that it even retains the kick, and that it even uses the same input of quick forward & light attack. If it does that much, i would be surprised if it didn't also retain the guard break property on that move. For that matter, if there are parrying enemies in that game, the forward & heavy attack that i am sure is probably also there is probably also unparryable. Actually, is there any pvp/co-op in LotF? It's sounded like it's purely solo, but i haven't followed that game too closely.

Unfortunately, it's actually just another thing they borrowed from Dark Souls, because this is very similar to the humanities system in the first Dark Souls, where having more active humanities variously increases many different stats including item discovery. (I just don't think many people realize that's what it actually did.)

There's a local store that had this lonely looking copy of Anachronox sitting on its shelves for years and years and years until it finally disappeared just a few years back. The second it wasn't there anymore, i immediately felt bad for not being the one that bought it.

I've been going back and forth on whether or not i should check this out, i've mostly been hearing good things about it. It's weird that, for how much influence the Souls series appears to be having on the industry, nobody's really actually tried to copy the formula in its entirety until this.