Sno

I definitely developed a small twitch back when Nintendo decided to call the final revision of the GBA the "Game Boy Micro" (When it is, in fact, the only GBA that does not play Game Boy games.) So yeah, maybe Nintendo needs to work on their naming schemes.

The stat gains are random to point, there are invisible character growths that determine the likelihood of a stat growing on a level-up, and those growths are determined by a combination of the character's innate attributes and attributes bestowed by its selected class. (Growths are usually fairly easy to intuit, because while the growths themselves are invisible, their effects are not. What a character's current strengths appear to be will likely continue to be its strengths.) As for maxing out a class before promoting, well... At least make sure you have all the skills you can get out of the class. (They don't always unlock at the same levels in each class, so be careful. There will always be two available unlocks per class, but a character will have five slots to equip learned skills. There's a lot of fun combinations of skills you can engineer through the promotions and reclassing system.) Beyond that, it depends on the character. If the character is already particularly strong, it probably doesn't hurt to just promote them right away. There are class-specific stat caps, and they're quite low on the non-promoted classes. If a character is bumping up against those, indicated by highlighted stats on a character's stat sheet, go ahead and promote them. If it's a character that's struggling a bit, the promotion can give it huge short-term gains, but promoted classes gain exp at a dramatically slower rate. It normally ends up being a bad move in long term. As such, i would normally try to max out this unit in its non-promoted class before applying a promotion seal. Also, when you start finding class change seals, save those for promoted-to-promoted shifts. (Which become available at lvl 10 of a promoted class.) You'll also eventually find some books that permanently boost weapon ability, i'd recommend saving those to push promoted/class-changed units out of e-rank weapons. (Just a simple way to make it easier to take advantage of a character's newly unlocked weapon specialization.) That's certainly not everything, but that should be the important basics. (Keep in mind that some units join you already promoted. Frederick, in particular, may seem awesome in the early game, but if you're playing well, he'll be outpaced by everybody else. Don't let him eat up all the exp early-on.)

What the fuck?

Still on EDF:IA, the remixed missions that open up once you beat the game the first time are by far the more enjoyable half of the game.

I played through it with friends and we all really liked it. *shrug* Sandlot's such a cult favorite that Vicious Cycle never really stood a chance of winning anybody over, but for my part, i think they made an alright game.

I rather like Insect Armageddon, i think Vicious Cycle did an alright job with that game. (In fact, it seems as if Sandlot is taking a few cues from it for 2025.) Regardless, i absolutely adore 2017, i can't wait to play 2025. I don't know what's next for Sandlot after this, but i feel like RAD is long overdue a sequel.

According to the game's credits, the team at Treasure that originally made Ikaruga had only five people.

My dad was/is way into pinball, so i grew up in a home with a PinBot machine that was kept in absolutely perfect condition, I didn't really know enough to appreciate it until after it had been traded off to a relative who treated it terribly. Subsequently, there were a couple other pinball machines that came and went, but i never liked any of them as much as that PinBot machine. The last one that came through the house was a "The Getaway: High Speed 2" machine, but it was in pretty rough shape to start with and was always breaking down. I was never particularly skilled at any of those machines, but i do have a certain fondness for them, and I don't think i've ever played a pinball Video game that even remotely captured the feel of the physics.

Oh hey, I love the DCAU cartoons and even own Beyond on DVD. The first season of that show is just really good, there's a strong serialized throughline and a lot of great character development. It becomes much more typically episodic in season 2 and 3, and i feel like there's a lot of misfires in those two.

Technically, it's the xbox pad that is reversed. The Nintendo layout came first by a solid decade.

Oh, hey. So i guess Recca, an incredibly rare technical marvel of the Famicom, is now available on the European 3DS Virtual Console. I plan on buying this as soon as it becomes available in North America. Speaking of scrolling shooters on the 3DS, Canada is still bizarrely excluded from the worldwide release of Kokuga. (The latest game from this dude.) I am still feeling a bit stung over that, i really wanted to play that.

For a player new to the series, I would actually recommend exactly what you're already doing, normal difficulty with permadeath enabled. The permadeath enforces the methodical, cautious tactics the series is designed around, but on normal it's not so difficult that you'll be replaying missions over and over to avoid losses, nor will small mounting mistakes have you deep in the game and critically ill-equipped for what you're facing. Unlike many previous games in the series, FEA's filled with random battles and offers many opportunities to course correct, but it's still a very challenging game on its higher difficulty levels. You know, but if somebody's comfortable with strategy RPG's, they should go right ahead and play on hard. That's what i was playing on.

Couple other things, because i feel like it: This is a very valuable page to keep an eye on once you're to the point where you're promoting and class changing characters. (You generally don't want to promote or class change a unit before its obtained all of the available skills it can get from its class.) There's a lot of other arcana and nuance about which level you should be promoting/class changing characters at, but the available skills are generally the most important thing to keep an eye on before making that jump. (You also generally don't want to class change a unit with a promoted class into a non-promoted class, not even to chase some extra skills. To avoid having to do that during a class change, the promoted unit needs to first reach a certain level in its promoted class, and then it can class change from its promoted class to another promoted class, instead of having to start over at a non-promoted class.) Some recruitment opportunities are missable too, so be careful about that stuff. The game makes it pretty obvious most of the time, but there's a few that have odd requirements. Also, that skill inheritence thing i mentioned, it happens whenever you start a child character's paralogue, and not actually when the parents marry. With a handful of scripted exceptions, the two skills in the last open slot on each parent will be inherited to the offspring when the mission starts. (With this knowledge, you would, for example, want to make absolutely sure Donnel inherits Aptitude to whoever his kid ends up being.)

If this is your first Fire Emblem game, and if you're playing with permadeath on, this is a mistake. Especially on its hard setting, the game becomes very difficult around its tenth chapter when all the side missions start opening up. (You're also only about a fifth of the way through the game's content at that point.) Also, in case it's not clear: Losing dudes is not an acceptable outcome, it's a mounting loss that snowballs as you keep playing, it will make you miss out on other recruitment opportunities and quests. FE games used to handle permadeath in a much more flud and interesting way, offering up additional quests and recruitment opportunities because you're struggling, but FEA doesn't. It wants you to keep everybody alive, the permadeath is just there to make you play cautiously. (So if that mission is going poorly, keep in mind: L & R & Start reboots the game.) So the questionable stuff out of the way, i feel the metagame you have to play with the easily predicted AI opens up in a really interesting way once you've fleshed out your army into subsequent promotions and class changes. Your army is eventually customized to such a degree where it really feels like you're enacting your own clever strategies, rather than playing through a prescribed series of moves. I mean, If we were talking about Advance Wars, i would completely agree with your complaint, but in Fire Emblem, i believe a lot of the strategy actually comes from planning your character builds out across multiple missions. Your army eventually becomes so totally distinct to you, that the way you complete a mission will be wholly different from how somebody else is going to tackle that same mission. It's an element that is especially difficult to gauge if you're early into the game, though i don't know how far in you are. (None of the promotion, class change, or relationship stuff really even factors in until you're about ten missions in.) For those early missions, just make sure you're not letting your stronger units eat up all the exp, you'll run into big problems later in the game if you do that. As for the various systems, there are a lot of little things that aren't really adequately explained, true enough. This is a great wealth of information about the game and its systems. Let me offer some information though: The support system, which is in part the "romance" system, has your units building affinity for eachother as they execute actions in adjacent squares from eachother. So if you attack a unit while surrounded by three other units of your own, the surrounding compatible units will all build affinity for the attacking unit. (Healing or other special support actions only build affinity for the caster and the recipient.) Eventually support conversations will be unlocked to view between missions, ranking up their support rating to offer greater adjacency bonuses while in battle, and once you unlock an S-rank conversation, those characters will get married. (How marriage determines the stats, skills, and available classes of the eventual offspring is a whole other rabbit hole. Probably don't worry about it too much, maybe read up on how skill inheritence works.) There's also sort of two different things you might be referring to as a "pairing system". There's the dual system, and the pair-up system. The dual system is when an adjacent character shows up to help your attacking/defending unit. There's random chances for nullifying damage taken, adding an additional attack, or offering a morale boost, and they're all determined by the support ranking. (If there are multiple adjacent characters, the one that joins will be the one with the highest support.) The pairing system is a seperate thing, despite being easy to conflate with the dual system, since paired units override adjacent units. So the unit in the back of the pair lends some stat bonuses to the unit in the front, which is important for keeping weaker units competitive if you're trying to earn them some battle experience. The two units that are paired also earn support for eachother faster than adjacent units would, and the unit in the back is immune to damage. Switching the the unit at the front of the pair is a free action, that's important to keep in mind. (You can travel far with a cavalry unit, then switch out to a knight and attack, for example.) The reason you don't want to just pair up all your units is simply that each pair is reducing the number of available attacks in any given turn, making it more difficult to hold off an aggressive enemy.

I loved the first season of that show, with all of its cyberpunk aspirations, before just turning into Batman's highschool adventures.

I would totally play some Mario Kart.

I have a lot of problems with microtransaction-based games, but one of the biggest ones is that it sort of breaks the implicit contract the designer makes with the player. It's an abuse of the idea that a game, as designed, is an experience meant to be enjoyed. If you can pay your way through the game, they are nakedly exposing it as a grind meant to psychologically wear you down, there is no longer even the pretense of a enjoyable progression loop. There is a carrot being dangled, a wall is placed in front of you, and you can pay a couple bucks to break through it for your reward. The game is actually about how long you'll go before you choose to pay. I find the whole microtransaction trend pretty grotesque, bleeding money out of addictive personalities they're conditioning to keep paying. It seems like a lot of people want to believe that the one percent of people who are being pumped to keep these games afloat are all eccentric millionaires, but that really isn't likely, is it? The evidence is rather contrary to it. (Regardless, the industry calls these people "whales".) There's a lot of uncomfortable parallels with gambling, especially in games where the rewards for the microtransactions are randomized. Hell, it's arguably worse, because there is literally no material gain even when you "win".

I have just added TheLastBaron, SecretAsianMan, and Zeusthecat. My code is: 0774 - 4258 - 1865

2) You might be a little disappointed about how LTTP actually handles that stuff. A lot of the core pieces of equipment are considered in the control scheme, activated either contextually or through a dedicated button, but there's then only one item slot for things like the bow and the bombs.

Sweet! While i'm at it, i'll also peruse FTP.CDROM.COM for some sweet QUAKE mods.

I usually get around 4-5 hours on the 3DS, maybe only 3 with the brightness up and wi-fi on. It's still one of the big weak points of the system, but the 3DSXL is supposed to be a tiny bit better.

The degree to which everything in the game is an injoke about the FGC is deeply wonderful. Half the characters are based on real people from that scene.

Regarding 3D: I find a different sweet spot for the 3D slider in each game i play, some games give me some minor eye strain if they're turned up all the way. I do leave it on most of the time, i like the effect, it's nice 3D. The viewing angle is very small though, yeah. I find myself losing it easily when playing a more active game that has me instinctively tilting the 3DS around. It's inspired by Treasure's Guardian Heroes. I believe some of the original team even worked on it? I mostly stuck to the main character since she had a lot of tools for easy combos and juggles, lots of fun.

Treating it like a grind is probably the mistake. I pretty much just check in once every couple weeks now. Something new and cute happens, i mess around for an hour, and then i'm done.

The new one being based off the overworld of LTTP is why you should play it, it's so directly referential to that game, it's being pitched as a sequel to LTTP. Also, personally, i like LTTP a lot more than Awakening, there's plenty of people who would argue for either game.