Sno

Maybe, i honestly didn't even touch the normal difficulty, so i can't say anything about where that is at. As for hard, feeling like you need to hang way back and enact some death-by-a-thousand-cuts tactics on enemies is probably a habit to break yourself of. There's a bit of Halo in how Infinite is balanced, there are big pay-offs for calculated risks.

Oh, i loved the handymen fights, i thought they were big highlights of the game. The first key to fighting them is to not use shock jockey, they're not vulnerable to it. It seems like everybody tries to use it against them, but it's not going to help any. (I usually stick to Devil's Kiss, but i'm told they're actually particularly vulnerable to the crows.) The the other thing is that when they start leaping to close distance with you, if you stop backpedaling and just start strafing around them, they will hugely overshoot and fly way past you.

I've been playing this too, I had posted some thoughts in the 3DS thread. I had never played an Etrian Odyssey game before either, and hadn't played a game like it in a very, very long time, but was really surprised how much i ended up enjoying it.

If the clock ticks through a full hour while you're busy with a wave, what actually happens? Once i realized that i could manipulate the hands of the clock with the poltergust, i assumed the worst and just made sure to keep giving myself more time, there was definitely nothing to it about being "fast enough" to complete the waves. I thought it was kind of a cool boss fight.

So... What exactly didn't you like about the clock tower boss fight?

It's been mentioned in another thread, i'm glad to see that people are getting behind those guys.

Rumors out of GDC are that Bravely Default is almost certainly coming to the West, The localization of Project X Zone was announced for June, an Etrian Odyssey spin-off with an emphasis on story was just announced, SMT4's release date has been more closely pinned down to July, while Soul Hackers is out in a couple weeks, and we're probably even getting Level 5's cutesy RPG "Fantasy Life". The 3DS is going absolutely JRPG crazy. I'm excited about Bravely Default, i've heard good things. I'm also quite amused that Project X Zone is being localized. The Guild 02 games are looking pretty definite too. (Confirmed so far is some kind of first-person sci-fi adventure, and an arcade-style action game from Keiji Inafune.)

I'm surprised to hear the later bosses are that terrible, the first one in the first mansion seemed terrifically clever.

I really enjoyed my time with this game, it definitely deserved more of an audience than it found.

As for the difficulty, if you're not having fun, don't play on hard. Though i will say, the game felt to me like it had been balanced around the hard difficulty. I thought everything clicked in a really satisfying way.

Possession combos, for example, are as simple as possessing a guy and setting him on fire with Devil's Kiss. Congratulations, you've created a minion that is both on fire and exploding. There's a bunch of possible Vigor combos. Combining Shock Jockey and Devil's Kiss with other things is the easiest way to discover some combos.

Given that the crow trap is extremely powerful and costs a fair chunk of your salts, the way it works is still quite a gain. It would be insanely overpowered if it was this thing that could just propagate by itself.

Has anybody picked up on the vigor combos? I haven't seen anybody mention it here. You can apply elemental effects to possessed enemies or an instance of crows, things like that.

That really isn't true, you shouldn't let it keep you from playing Infinite. My first time through that stretch of the game, i got through with a single pick left over and every door/safe unlocked. (There's like five doors and two safes in that whole area.) Second time through, i did the same with seven lockpicks left over. There's no forced choice, the picks are just really well hidden.

I played Fate of Atlantis when i was young, and i absolutely adore it, but i never really had a connection with any of the other Lucas Arts adventure games. (The majority of the adventure games i was being exposed to as a kid were Sierra games, and it kind of made me dismiss adventure games for a long, long time. I hated how player-hostile they were, the unwinnable states and all that.) The X-Wing and Dark Forces games were hugely formative gaming franchises for me though, and are also the reason i got into Star Wars in the first place. (I still have all of my Dark Forces discs, even the excellent and oft-forgotten Mysteries of the Sith add-on for JK:DF2.) I still feel that Tie Fighter is probably the very best example of its genre. Man, and the first forums i ever posted on were some Dark Forces fansites, not long after i was first online grabbing Quake mods from ftp.cdrom.com. (I think a few of those Dark Forces fansites might still be around, well over fifteen years later.)

It's kind of a matter of warped expectations, but relatively speaking, the Zero Escape games are quite tame. You know what actually makes me uncomfortable? Recent example: The character portraits in Etrian Odyssey IV. Largely innocuous, harmless game that just happens to have a bunch of little girls in thongs. WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHY.

One of my favorite things about Infinite thus far has been: Gah! I already posted that only a page prior! I also posted the 2011 demo which is quite fascinating.

It's just an unbelievable stroke of unprofessional behavior and a startling show of arrogance. Quite a worrying glimpse into one of the minds behind the next X-box.

So this happened. Great PR for a really sensitive time. After first reading about it, I watched it take literally minutes for this story to explode across the internet. People are feeling particularly vitriolic about the implications of always-online, Sim City seems like it was the last straw for most people. Anyways, they're trying to save face, but if they were just joking around, then the issue is: Recognize your position, Twitter is not a private messaging service.

Huh, i guess i need to play Far Cry 3 now.

In response to this, Raven released the source code for JK2:JO and JK:JA. Pretty classy, those are great games that still have a pretty big fanbase. I love the whole Dark Forces series, i'm sad there was never a sixth game.

I had a few games of the Scarescraper and found it quite amusing. That MP component is more fleshed out than i would have expected.

I always absolutely loved the resource system in Total Annihilation and its successors. Instead of paying for everything in single sums or having a truck drive up to your base and dump off a pool of resources, you were essentially running an input/output ticker, and so you thought about the economy in the game very differently. It was about deficits and surpluses, a complex balancing act that encouraged planning things out across much longer terms than is usual in an RTS. If things went wrong with your economy, it was a gradual deficit that you could plan around and respond to, it was not a matter of you spending that truck full of resources the second it showed up at your door and not knowing when the next truck will arrive. TA's model was great, in part, because it was a more predictable system that allowed for you to more safely bankroll the kind of ambitious, broad strategies these games are known for. I was very disappointed when SupCom2 abandoned that model. (Well, i was disappointed in SupCom2 for a number of reasons.)

Simply put, it has very deep narrative connections to 999, such that you will want to play 999 first. It covers its bases pretty well, conveys most of the necessary information, but we're still ultimately talking about a game that has returning characters from the first, a story that discusses things that happened in the first, and features revelations that will be meaningless without knowledge of the first.