Sno

For another Treasure shmup, i love, love, love what they did with Gradius V: This level always stood out to me as an especially cool and inventive stage. if you're curious, the asteroid stage is another standout, especially its bossfight.

I heard that they were doing those in the US, but i hadn't heard that it was happening in Canada too. Also: The major august update will apparently bring with it more balance updates. So right now, all of the supers take 180 terrain points to become active. After the upcoming update, the killer wail will require 160, the echolocator will require 200, and the inkzooka will require 220. I agree with the killer wail buff and the considerable inkzooka nerf, but i'm not sure about the echolocator, i don't think it deserves that nerf. It's very good, but i'd argue that many of the other supers are still way more significant. The inkzooka had it coming though, i think that thing is the reason that the tentatek splattershot is one of the most dominant weapons in the game. (This might inadvertently make the E-Liter 3k and the Dynamo Rollers even more dominant.) Also, apparently special charge up and tenacity both have not been functioning correctly, so that's being fixed. I'm very curious to see if special charge up will seem as significant after the update. (It wasn't calculating properly, i guess.) Splash Wall and Inkstrike are also receiving minor fixes. A large number of the maps are being retooled for their gametype variants, the blocks and grates that appear to shuffle things around for each mode, but urchin underpass is being significantly reworked as a matter of level geoemetry, and that is a move i think is a super weird precedent and highly unnecessary. (They're opening up all the choke points, expanding the sniper nests, and adding more cover in the map center.) Urchin Underpass has its detractors, but it's by and large one of the more well liked maps in the game. It's nowhere near as controversial as Port Mackerel has been, why isn't that being retooled?

I have actually said the words "Splatoon is basically Dota" to a friend as shorthand for how matches play out, i agree with all the odd parallels you're pointing out here. I tend to equate fighting on controlled ground as being akin to fighting under a friendly tower or near a friendly creep wave. Speaking practically, i'm not immediately sure there's a whole lot to take from it in terms of strategy and tactics, but they're fun comparisons to make. That said, in turf war, one of the best responses to a team with dangerous amounts of momentum is to play out something akin to a split push, and i've definitely become very wary of that point in every match where everybody's getting their supers online for the first time, because whoever gets the upper hand on that initial exchange of supers is likely going to control the pace for a large portion of the match. As for that second thing... I feel like i've probably accomplished that as a general result of how i play, whenever i go into a fight i try to give myself as much ground as i possibly can, and that usually ends up giving whoever's already there more safe ground as well, but i've never actually considered purposefully laying down an escape option for an ally. I guess because i can't really communicate to them that's what i'm doing, but i know i'd love to have somebody do that for me, and i think i'll probably start doing that for teammates. I can't imagine playing this game without the motion control, there isn't really any aim sticky going on with dual analog as far as i can tell, and you need precision for the shooters and the chargers. You also need the motion control for bunny hopping hijinx as well, which is very common in the higher ranks. I've gone as far as choosing clothing based on brand as well... So i can have better odds for getting what i want when i reroll. (Brands weight clothing towards certain sub skill rolls!)

Gah! One bad roll and my whole plan just got ruined. The only way i'll be able to feasibly reroll this gear into something i want to use is with the rewards from a splatfest, but there's none on the horizon. Anyways, I'm also B+ right now, kind of stuck in limbo there. I'd like to say that i feel like i should be in the A ranks, but at least in 1v1 fights, i feel like i'm plateauing. (It's those damn dynamo rollers, i swear that's all it is!) It's hard to really know though, it's hard to know when you're so subject to the whims of your teammates. The teammate lottery is easily the part of this game i hate the most, being forced into a solo queue ranked mode with no control over who's watching your back. Very rare is the game where i feel like i have a team that understands any kind of coordinated tactics. You know, i want to believe that nobody here needs to hear things like this, but i'm going to throw out some tips anyways: Like, hey, in tower mode, i know people don't want to stay on the tower when their team has collapsed around them, it's a dangerous position and all that, but just... just try to ping it every couple seconds, just swim up there and touch it and back off again. Try to keep the ground around it painted as well as you can to give yourself space to work. Keep it pushed until your team can come back and be a defensive bulwark for whoever wants to sit up top. In splatzones, one of the best things you can do is persistently and aggravatingly contest a hill from a safe vantage point. You don't need to seek out kills, you need to just keep the hill owned or contested. Your opponents will overextend while trying to push you away from the hill, and it will give you and your teammates plenty of opportunities to shut them down as they give up a safe posture. You know, and in all modes, watch your map, have map awareness, look out for the tell-tale path of ink that reveals somebody trying to flank you. And like, here's some kind of Halo 101 stuff that i think is variously applicable in Splatoon: My golden rule playing Halo was "don't chase" because there is never not an ambush lying in wait for you, every corner is a trap. I used to play team doubles a lot, and the rule of the day was to coordinate fire on one target to remove one of the opponents quickly and turn the dynamic into a nearly impossible 2v1 for the remainder. In response to exchanges like this, the person taking fire generally wants to take a few steps back and play a little more defensively, while the person not taking fire can take up a more aggressive posture. You would switch roles with your partner accordingly, whoever is taking fire backs off. The idea is that the person who is injured will be a highly tempting target that their opponents will want to chase after, and that invariably ends with them overextending and getting flanked and killed by the injured person's ally. It doesn't work completely for Splatoon, because the objective is never just to get more kills, there's always some piece of the environment that you need to control, but a lot of the principles hold true. Overextending into enemy terrain puts you at a terrible disadvantage with severely restricted movement and potential ambushes literally all around you, but in Splatoon, you have to put yourself in those situations to win. So you try to provoke a response by poking and prodding at the various corners of the map as you move forward, you try to be aware of those dangerous sightlines that you can be attacked at range from, and when you find a fight, it's super nice to have somebody to step in and cover you as you wind back towards more advantageous footing. (You know, I would even equate hiding in ink with moving slowly to evade motion detection in Halo, some of that stuff even feels similar to me. Edit: It occurred to me later that i've completely ignored how Halo's own map control dynamics, the fight for power weapon spawns, similarly forces you into risky positions and confrontations with enemies, so there's probably even less of a difference than i'm asserting here.) It's obviously on the whole a very different game, but the primary point i'm striving for is that i think there are some tremendously good shooter fundamentals in Splatoon, and i'm just itching for the day i'll be able to get into a coordinated party playlist for ranked. Hey, but who knows? Maybe ranked parties will be a total shit show.

I can't take credit for all of it, a lot of it is informed by information gathered by a very active community of Splatoon players out on the internet in various places, but i do have around a half-dozen post-it notes with various original bits of research and scribbles on them. Heh. I have all of the available weapons and have amassed a nearly complete collection of the gear currently in the game, and i've also played enough to get some sub skills onto all of them, so it's been pretty easy to mix and match things to poke around for interesting thresholds. As for quick respawn, i thought it over and what i was saying didn't seem right, so i went and double checked it myself in a game just now. I was operating on the assumption that the default spawn timer was 10 seconds, but it's around 5-6. One quick respawn main drops it to around 3-4. So it's actually saving you something like 12 seconds on six deaths, which is still pretty okay, but i'm second guessing its place in my build now.

I just replayed Quake for the first time since i was a kid, and it's a game that was kind of a formative experience for me, so i've always been wary about treading on those memories. It was a weird experience, and i'm a little bummed out because i don't think the game holds up quite as well as i wanted it to. The weird thematic incoherence has often been a topic for people who want to look critically at the game, but i think it's actually one of Quake's strengths. It gives it a kind of weird sense of mechanical purity, that it sort of ends up being this abstract, contextless violence. I think the physics and the general feel of that game are as close to perfect as it could be, though the feel of the weapons specifically, and some of the weapon balance, came across as a little awkward this time around. The big thing that wasn't working for me though is that fourth episode with the unique and completely awful enemies and its dark, difficult to see, and difficult to navigate environments. It also seemed like there was a lot of cheap damage, with powerful enemies quietly being dumped into corridors you had just passed through seconds earlier, no walls noisily receding to signal the change in the map. That ambient ost is killer. (It's not in the steam version, so i just had it on a loop in the background.) But yeah, Quake's still mostly awesome, but i think i have to say that it probably hasn't aged quite as well as some of Id's other games. I'm probably on board for eventually doing a forum group, somebody just needs to set a time that works for everybody.

Maybe not my favorite level, because i'm a scrub and i suck at this level, but seeing it played well is mesmerizing.

So i want to revise an earlier opinion about damage ups, and then i'm going to list off a bunch of other updated observations about skills in the game. Damage ups cap early and hard and at different points on different shooters, but they don't cap at all on chargers and blasters and rollers and actually even grenades. (Though i've heard and generally observed that damage ups past the shooter cap still reduce damage fall-off past maximum range, but that's not very useful in most cases.) Now, in many of those cases, it seems like it still wouldn't matter because you're dealing with one hit kills mostly, but that's not really true. You might gain a little more consistency out of your roller's flick attack, but the real treat is faster kills at lower charges on chargers, improved splash damage for grenades and blasters, and some extremely interesting results in a few specific cases. Burst grenades, for example, which are not capped by by damage up and are not normally a one hit kill either. The custom jet squelcher is an interesting shooter that has a kraken and burst grenades bundled with it. The burst grenades on that have some pretty interesting interactions with the jet squelcher itself, namely landing a direct hit with a burst grenade and cancelling out of that throw into weapons fire makes a 4 hit kill a 2 hit kill that's about a quarter of a second faster. (Which makes a slow and very long-range weapon quite competitive up close. Also, for the record, it drops to 3 shots if the enemy only gets hit by the splash damage of the burst grenade.) I've been playing around with that though, and it took exactly five damage up subs to turn that combo into a 1 burst grenade and 1 shot kill that is just absurdly fast since you cancel out of the grenade throwing animation into weapons fire very quickly. (With these damage buffs, it's two shots of the JS when going of the burst grenade's splash damage, btw.) So it turns out damage up is awesome, but still super situational. Builds kind of have to find the right thresholds for each weapon and cater to those individually, and in some cases, weapons just won't gain anything from it. Also, i no longer feel that run speed up and swim speed up make enough of a difference to really matter. Run speed still seems more significant, and is very nice when combined with weapons that retain a lot of movement speed while firing, the n-zap is a good example, but swim speed is just such a tiny benefit. With no real data to back it up, i can say that i feel like i can maneuver more precisely and accelerate more quickly when using swim speed up, but i do not feel like my maximum speed is increased by any noticeable degree. (btw, neither swim speed up or run speed up affect the rollers' momentum during the held attack.) Of the three ammo buffs, ink saver main seems to have the most noticeable impact, but i still prefer using ink recovery. Given a lot of the details up top about damage ups, defense up also seems more useful now, it really throws those strats off. (Also the dummies in the training mode are clearly meant to be defense up mains, not subs as i think i had initially believed.) I think ink resistance kinda sucks now, after the nerf. Ninja squid is still awesome, despite the nerf. Quick respawn is hugely undervalued. If you die 6 times in a match, one quick respawn main is saving you 40 seconds of down time. In a game with 3-5 minute matches, that is huge. Special charge up is probably the all-around mvp of the skills though, it should probably basically always be in your build, and i think special saver is pretty valuable too. (Tenacity, imo, just doesn't really do enough to compare to either of those.) The are other skills that have proven very useful, such as special duration up and bomb throw, that should be factored into focused builds, but are hard to work into generalized builds because they're so situational. (Each of the two named do basically nothing for certain supers and sub weapons.) I don't really have any opinions about the super jump skills because i've basically stopped using super jump in the game aside from manic end-game tower pushes in ranked. Super jumps are just so unsafe, even with the stealth jump, teams never really ever try to make room for their allies to move in. (Though if they do, take advantage of it, of course.) I feel like the meta will probably swing back to super jumps pretty hard once ranked parties are up though, a communicative team could probably abuse the super jump mechanic pretty intensely. (A build with a fast super jump and recon could theoretically be crazy useful in a voice-chatting ranked group. Have somebody return to spawn to check on enemy positions and then go group up with team mates.)

The ranked parties thing will be a new playlist called Squad Battle, it's worth pointing out. Normal ranked will still be solo queue. Further letter ranks will actually probably help ranked out a fair amount. Right now there's a thing where there are some A+ guys that obviously hit that ceiling hard, but are still getting dropped into lower B and A rank games and just wreck house to a hilarious degree. A little more distance there might make ranked a more enjoyable experience for everyone. (Though it might only be a temporary solution, there are some big issues with how ranking works in Splatoon.) Also, there was a japanese trailer for this update that depicted two new maps, maps we know not to be on the disc because those maps are now all live. One of the new maps was set on the roof of an apartment complex, and another spread out across a suspension bridge under construction. These maps are mia in descriptions of what the update contains, so they've probably been held back for another update a little further into the future. (Or will be in the update, but not be unlocked at that time.) Finally, In addition to these actual new guns and their variants, there are still around 20-30 other weapons on the disc that have yet to be unlocked by Nintendo. (There's also a CTF-esque mode that's still locked.) People think there might be more in-game music on the way for the game too. UNFORTUNATELY, the news isn't all cool. Apparently one individual has managed to get weapon hacks working online, demonstrating it on a livestream with effects ranging from "painting the entire arena with one shot" to "causing an overflow and lagging everybody out of the game." The person allegedly indicated that they would not release the specifics of how it was accomplished or the tools they used, but... You know... I guess it requires you to have a Wii U that has not been updated past a particular older and more vulnerable firmware, so it's probably not likely to become extremely prevalent over night, and i would hope Nintendo realizes they need to combat stuff like this for Splatoon to continue to flourish, but we'll see. These sorts of things are basically an inevitability for online games, and it usually comes down to how the developer was prepared to deal with it.

I remember spending a lot of time in Halo 3's forge with friends and not really doing anything, not really building anything, just kind of spawning tanks and throwing them at eachother. Forge just kind of turned into a glorified chatroom that happened to have tanks and murder. Certainly though, i also spent a ton of time with co-op and matchmaking and even -actually- making things in forge and playing those things in custom games, but when i think back on it, probably an alarming amount of time was spent just fucking around doing nothing. Another one: Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when, back when i was playing Total Annihilation as a kid, i used to love setting up skirmish matches that were just massively stacked against me. Huge groups of allied AI commanders. Except, see, the AI in that game had a pretty big issue. The commanders didn't really know how to deal with enemy air transports, and you could easily hijack their commanders if you rushed early in the game with a swarm of air transports. So i would go around collecting all the AI commanders, send around some early rushes to destroy what they had built, and then have all the suspended-in-cargo AI commanders just hang out on one end of the map while i built up my base unopposed. Get everything in place, make that hard save, and then just loose all those allied AI commanders and have hordes of thousands of units crash against my base's defenses to then see if i could both hold out and then mount a retaliation strong enough to still win the game. That was definitely me playing that game in a "wrong" way, but I also played that game online a bunch back then, and given that live matches rarely made it to end-game tech, it was just my way of ensuring that i had opportunities to play around with the coolest toys.

I've just about finished the add-on and i like it quite a lot, though perhaps more for the unusual places the narrative goes than the actual game part. It plays pretty safe with the mechanics, the puzzles are generally concise and not overly challenging and built around one or two small twists on the application of the basic toolbox, though the game seems to be completely omitting at least one of the tools available to it and a lot of what's there can feel like retread. There's some really interesting puzzles in there for sure, though. The new environments are gorgeous too, that's worth noting, it's the most visually attractive stuff anywhere in that game. What's more interesting to me about that thing is what it's doing as a story though, and since it literally just came out, i'm not even going to get into spoilers. It could be taken as very irreverent and pandering though, but i think there's more to what it's trying to do than that. It's good though, i'd recommend it. It's fairly big too, it's about as large as one of the worlds in the base game, but it's very, very dense with narrative content.

Anybody else watch Evo over the weekend? I still need to catch up on UMVC3 and USF4, but i'm going to say that the KI3 finals were the unexpected highlight of the event for me. Unfortunately, i don't recall what game it was, but there was definitely a game being speedrun at one of the GDQ events where the runner was talking about how manipulating the framerate was basically accepted by that particular community as a valid tactic for speedrunning it because of the various collision bugs that bore out of it.

The Rollercoasters took the NA splatfest. Waterslides had the popular vote, but the Rollercoasters played well enough to secure a large win majority and bring in the overall victory. 24 super sea snails! Woo!

I have also done this, also for the coasters. Seeing the huge bias in favor of the water slides in miiverse posts around the hub sure makes me feel like i picked the wrong side. Splatfest was pretty rough for me this time around though. Connectivity seemed pretty bad, i never really managed to land in a good party that would last for more than a couple of games, and i kind of hate two of the three maps that were in rotation.

It's an interesting conversation to have had, certainly. Huh? I'm not saying that the rooms being designed is a tick against it, i'm saying that the rooms being designed and dull is a tick against it. There's no primitive procedural generation to blame it on. It's also obviously not producing levels that are literally broken, but in the broader context of the randomized nature of the game, they're not always completable. I feel the potential solutions that are provided have enough of a downside to not really warrant being engaged with. Hey, Super Metroid though, Super Metroid's cool. I think this Rogue Legacy thing has run its course.

There's been a small balance update along the way, but it's mostly just been weapons and maps. Depending on how long you've been gone, some of the additional weapons will have changed the meta pretty dramatically. So did that balance patch, actually. The big overhaul is coming in august, though nobody's sure what the entirety of that will end up being. Edit: Oh, of course, the tower mode. If you haven't played that, it's a ton of fun. It rotates in and out of ranked, which will be gone for the duration of the Splatfest, unfortunately.

See, that's a point i'm probably willing to concede on. If nothing else, all the conversations about platformers i've had on these boards over the last little while illustrate to me that people approaching the genre from different entry points expect very different things out of physics and control. To me, the movement felt... I don't know how else to describe it other than loose, but not unresponsive as you're taking it to mean. It felt to me like none of the movement had any weight to it. I gave that game way more time that i felt like i should have, and i never got used to how it controls.

No, i will reassert that the majority of what i dislike in Rogue Legacy is definitely the execution of its core mechanics and its level design. The dull and simplistic enemies, the loose control mechanics, the ambiguous hitboxes, the unreliable knockback, etc. (Edit: I keep wanting to add more things here, as i continue to think back on the game it just raises up more frustrating memories of it. Those classes were terribly balanced.) Some of them are certainly more open to debate, but the wild and confusing disparity between the player sprite and its collision surely is not. As for the level design, the layouts may be randomized, but the rooms are not. Play enough of that game and it's obvious that rooms repeat and are designed, and those designs are generally just not very interesting, and at worst are fundamentally broken. Treasure rooms that need to be solved with items that didn't appear on a given run, for example. Sure you can lock the castle until you have a character that deal with those challenges, but locking the castle reduces the rewards in the castle. The game is constantly giving you questions without answers. It's hard to overlook as an element of simple randomized omission when it constantly draws attention to the matter. Instead of something simply not appearing in a given run, it's giving you impossible tasks, and it beats you over the head with it constantly. I think that's really shitty design. Trying to assert that i just don't like roguelike or roguelite designs is, i think, a bit of a false premise where Rogue Legacy is concerned. This is going to be a tangent. I like the genre and its derivatives quite a lot, but i how i feel about the genre seems rather immaterial here since Rogue Legacy doesn't actually even adhere to what i think is probably the core tenet of roguelike designs. I think far too much of Rogue Legacy depends on what you did in previous playthroughs for it be properly considered as such. So much of that game depends on you having persisted through mechanical progression in advance of any given run, instead of taking each run as a singular thing, a microcosm of choices, reactions, and game progression. There are other games, Nuclear Throne and FTL as examples, that have unlocks persisting through subsequent playthroughs, but they are not progression systems tying together disparate runs into a single advancing playthrough, they're different starting points. I think Rogue Legacy is a fundamentally different thing and that its name is something of a misnomer, and, fair enough, i don't like the thing that it is. (Or maybe i do and i just think its core mechanics are bad, who knows. I definitely think its core mechanics are bad though.) I mean, but i get it, i'm apparently odd man out on the Rogue Legacy train.

Well, that's one of the points that's been frequently raised, people think this needed to happen after MN9 was out and over with.

I mean, Rogue Legacy is also mimicking the series mythology of Castlevania, it presents a caricatured take on Castlevania's central premise of a family of brave warriors that rises up every generation to take on a resurgent, amorphic castle and its demonic lords. Also, i'm not saying that it's impossible to play that game well, but the way it pushes back against skillful play with enemies that have overwhelming statistical advantages is an obvious indication that the game doesn't want you to get far without first engaging with the primary character building systems, which is ultimately a system that is built to reward repeated failure. It's a loop that is intentionally necessitating a resource grind before reasonably allowing progress through the game. Maybe that's interesting, that it's a game about kind of failing your way through it, but i don't think it's fun. Except, now that i've typed that up, here i am seeing some parallels in those words with how Monster Hunter is a game that is largely about grinding for resources to build the gear you need to fight bigger monsters. So maybe put all that aside, maybe it just all boils down to the already stated reasons for why i think Rogue Legacy's core mechanics and level design are bad. If the foundation of the game clicks, so does the grind, i guess.

Has La Mulana come up in this thread? Since this is generally now "the thread where Metroidvania games are discussed" i'm going to throw out a recommendation for that game, but... That's a game where people sort of need to know what they're getting into, it has a real sadistic streak. Lots of really cruel traps and difficult fights, but it also has maybe a few easily missed things and a bunch of fairly obtuse and complicated actual puzzles to solve. I mean, and the answers are there in the game, the clues are all over the place, but the game never tells you to look for them. It's that kind of game, it does not hold your hand at all and you can pretty thoroughly screw up a playthrough, but everything you need is in there somewhere. It all seemed very intentioned, it's a very well constructed and enjoyably devious game, but it's perhaps appealing for a narrower audience than basically every other game that has been noted in this thread. Available on Steam!

Has anybody here mentioned that custom games are apparently coming with the august update? I didn't realize that was a thing Nintendo had confirmed until very recently. So the august update will have both party matchmaking and custom games. I'm assuming custom games will be run out of private lobbies, and party matchmaking is allegedly going to be a new playlist. I wonder how the presence of those will affect matchmaking times across the board. There at least seems to be enough people playing to probably accommodate these additional features. Also: Splatfest starts on the 17th, today, at 9pm pacific.

So that Red Ash kickstarter has not been performing as well as one would expect of a kickstarter for a spiritual successor to Megaman Legends. Lots of accusations are being tossed around about how Comcept has mishandled that thing. Certainly, i don't think there was some grand misreading of the internet, there's definitely a lot of people who desperately want another game in the vein of Megaman Legends.

One possibility to consider is that you're getting wrecked by elemental damage. The late game monsters start tossing around tons of elemental attacks, so elemental resistances are a huge factor in g-rank. Having armor that could protect me against the specific elements g-rank monsters were throwing at me made a lot of those early g-rank fights a total cakewalk. (Failing that, certain elemental food bonuses can completely negate a specific weakness, or offer around a 7 point buff.) Like armor skills, elemental resistances actually have thresholds. You can even gain immunity versus a given elemental blight at around... I think 20? Elemental resistances are huge though, at -10 you might be getting ohk'd at full health in excellent armor, while at 20 you could end up with barely a scratch. Did you ever try the long swords? You get lots of mobility, lots of range, and relatively rapid attacks. I might be interested in being involved with a regular group game here. My character's sitting at around early g-rank right now, the other group i was playing with kind of fell apart and i was probably just going to call it done.

Seeing the way people are responding to this game and talking about this game gives the impression that it will suffer a spectacularly negative response when it comes out, and i'm saying that as a huge Megaman fan and somebody who thinks the game is actually looking pretty good. I think the issue lies with the fact that what IntiCreates and Comcept are doing with this game seems very evocative of the Megaman games IntiCreates' was making towards the end of their involvement with the franchise. Lots of dashing and lots of melee and lots of weird and gimmicky systems, i don't think that's what people wanted or expected from this kickstarter. Mighty No 9 seems like a fairly natural progression of what they were already doing with Megaman, and while their Megaman games were actually really great games, I think people generally wanted more of an old-school throwback out of this kickstarter. Anybody want to corroborate or refute that impression? Also, just... It really is ugly. It has such a barren and lifeless look. There's not really any denying it.