Sno

I never really thought i'd be into the whole Wizardry-derived style of RPG, but i've consistently heard that Etrian Odyssey is one of the best examples of the genre, and i'm finding myself to be quite enjoying EOIV thus far.

I hope they don't go down a more Dishonored/Deus Ex-like road with the game, because if it ends up being the kind of game that you can just murder your way through, they fucked up. Thief should be a stealth game first and foremost. Also, shadows need to be a big deal, the light gem and all that. Given that Human Revolution downplayed shadows and focused entirely on line of sight stealth, i'm a little worried on that front. I loved the hell out of Human Revolution though, those Eidos Montreal guys have earned some good faith.

I think i've seen your name in a bunch of the promotional material for the game, or just screenshots too, at least. I am amused at this revelation, heh. Anyways, i decided i wanted to play this game, and to my surprise it actually just let me import my save from the demo and keep playing from where i left off. I've also realized that there's no offset between the perspectives for the stereoscopy in Etrian Odyssey IV. The result is that the stereoscopy in the game has all these layers in its UI elements, but when it comes to the actual 3D space of the game, it's completely flat. There's no depth because the two images it's trying to shoot out at you are of the same point in space. One of the weirdest things i've see on the 3DS, and kind of hilarious to then see some reviews praising the game for its 3D effect.

System Shock 2 doesn't even have any hard delineations between its classes, you still have access to everything no matter what your starting point is. What it really comes down to that they give you a giant sandbox to build your character inside of, there are so many choices to make, but there's a very tight economy of resources to invest into that progression. Even though there isn't a rigid class system, you end up having to build a fairly rigid class to be effective. Not a lot of games achieve that kind of character building, it's very interesting. The restrictions feel meaningful because they're self-imposed to an end, rather than borne out of a rigid and arbitrary class system. I think it also makes the game endlessly replayable, with how much depth there is to explore in its systems. I'm really curious to see what the "1999 mode" of BioShock Infinite will exactly be, or if it'll even be in the game after how many times that thing seems to have shifted course.

We're on the 7th.

If you don't, the 3D might make you blind!

I've added you as well.

So has anybody else tried the Etrian Odyssey IV demo? I'm mentioning it again because it really, really seems like a very cool game, and that demo offers up a giant chunk of the game. (The first overworld area of the game, multiple dungeons, multiple quests, tons of classes, weapons, and skills. It's a seemingly uninhibited look at the first part of the game.)

Pokemon maybe, but probably also Animal Crossing: New Leaf or that in-development 3DS Smash Bros game. Well, there's certainly already games on the 3DS that do things even more ambitious. Fire Emblem: Awakening lets you set up a team that will be streetpassed out to other players who can then buy items from your characters or fight your team for a chance to recruit your custom avatar into their army. I don't know if that's necessarily true, Streetpass has a fairly distinct charm that doesn't really exist anywhere else.

What did DQ IX do, exactly? Man, there were a lot of DS games that had weird proto-Streetpass modes though, it was definitely something Nintendo had been experimenting with for a while. Just the impracticality of requiring you with your specific game in a specific sleep mode to stumble into somebody else with that same game in the same sleep mode made it totally untenable outside of Japan though. Streetpass, to its credit, at least kinda works.

Oh, there's almost always guaranteed to be a nerdy store clerk at any electronics store that will have a 3DS on standby to streetpass with customers that come through. Also: Mirror of Fate demo is on the eShop. I'm kind of digging it, i don't think it's bad. I was quite worried about this game, but it seems cool, i am tentatively on board.

The early missions just kind of throw characters at you with little rhyme or reason, yeah. Awakening doesn't have a very strong narrative. Also, it's actually just Chrom and your Avatar that will result in a game over, everybody else can die.

I don't think it matters if "Marth" dies as an NPC in one of those earlier story missions, you should be fine. That is very much an exception and not the rule though.

The new pairing system ends up being a pretty big part of how you need to play Awakening, yeah. Putting everybody in pairs will prevent you from doing the amount of damage you need to do in a single turn, but used sparingly, it's an excellent way to bolster and protect some weaker units while building supports. (Or to use the another unit as an intermediary for longer travel distances in a single turn.)

I found 3D Land very hard to play with the stereoscopy off, i was missing jumps constantly. (I refuse to call it 3D, games are already 3D.) With it on, i was just nailing everything. It made me appreciate what the effect can bring to a game, i felt the added depth perception made jumps easier to gauge and therefore made it a demonstrably better and more playable game. Most other games, it can be varying degrees of distracting or superfluous. Less successful implementations tend to almost entirely be because of poorly handled hud elements, surprisingly. (Or massive technical problems, some games have poorer framerates with the stereoscopy enabled.) Ultimately, the degree to which a person enjoys or even just tolerates the stereoscopy on the 3DS seems to be a fairly personal thing that varies significantly from individual to individual, but i've personally grown to like it quite a lot even just as an aesthetic. I like the subtle rolling hills it brings out in Fire Emblem: Awakening, for example, a game where the terrain appears otherwise very flat. It's even been used to great effect in a number of purely 2D games, particularly Mighty Switch Force and Mutant Mudds. With the passing "3D" craze being such a total ill-advised disaster for a multitude of implementation and business reasons, the 3DS stands as pretty much the singular example of the technology that i'm personally willing to live with. It doesn't give me a headache, it doesn't make me wear glasses, it's completely optional and even adjustable, and some games have been using it quite well. Also: I'll just throw this out there - If you're low on battery, in addition to disabling the wi-fi and some of the other obvious things, turning off the stereoscopy can help. (the stereoscopy actually doubles the brightness of the screen since it's projecting two images in two different directions.) As for the Streetpass thing, i haven't quite given up on it, i still take my 3DS along with me sometimes, but i definitely only get a couple hits every now and then. One of those things that probably works in Japan because of the population density, but not really anywhere else. (A big game like Animal Crossing: New Leaf or the inevitable 3DS Smash game could probably have a lot of people itching to Streetpass again.)

I will discourage playing the DLC maps, you're basically paying for cheats. Wildly overpowered items and game-breaking resource allotments as rewards. It's unfortunate that it's been handled that way, because many of the DLC missions themselves seem interesting and well made, but i think they would completely ruin the game if exploited. Hell, but if you're committed to your playthrough, maybe that's what you need to keep going. Christ though, it just seems so wrong. I can't advise that course, i've looked through the DLC and it's tons of serious game-changing stuff. It's gross, it's a very improper exploitation of the DLC model. There are missions that exist for the sole purpose of farming gold, exp, and legendary weapons. (In amounts that would make literally everything else in the game seem like a waste of time.) You know, but in there, there is some stuff that looks alright, it's not a complete shit show. (Only a few maps are available right now, but there's going to be a lot of stuff, judging by what came out for the japanese version of the game.) Let's say be careful about which of those packs you choose to buy, and how you use the rewards you reap.

SotC is supposed to be a distant prequel to Ico.

I'll add you.

Relying on the promoted character they always give you at the start these games is one of the worst mistakes to make in a Fire Emblem game. Frederick has sub-average growths and gains levels more slowly because he starts promoted, he's just eating up exp better earned elsewhere. (Additionally, by the standards of where you'll end up with everybody else, he has terrible stats for a promoted character.) Relying on him to get you through the early game will just end up making the mid and late game magnitudes worse. (There's a big difficulty jump at around chapter 12 too.) That all said, you do kind of need to use him to shepherd your characters along in the early goings. Give him bronze or iron weapons and use him to soften up targets for other characters to finish off, or use him as a partner in pairs to buff up the other characters. Additionally, given that this is one of the Fire Emblem games with random battles showing up on the world map, it's not like you can't make up ground later in the game, but it's going to be a lot of tedious grinding. You definitely don't want to give up on Donnel, the unique skill that improves his growths will eventually make him one of your best units. (When his kid shows up, you'll want to make sure that is the skill they inherit from him. Inherited skills are selected from whichever skill is in the last occupied skill slot for the character, and inheritance happens at the start of the child's recruitment mission, so you have plenty of time to sort it out.) Really though, hard in this game is hard. Only six chapters in, you shouldn't feel too committed to the game to bail and start over. I'd advise normal classic for a first playthrough. (Or hard casual, but casual can make for a much more reckless game that is very unlike Fire Emblem. Granted, hard casual is how i'm playing, so take that for what you will.)

You've been sending me a lot of swapnotes.

Wayforward just announced Mighty Switch Force 2. That's cool, i'm excited about that.

So it's tuesday, anybody have input on whether or not we put this on pause for a week so the few of us that have fallen behind can catch up? Otherwise, it's onto the eighth. To me, it doesn't make any real difference, i have a bunch of the game to catch up on regardless, and i'm actually thinking it might be bad to stall the club for people who are keeping up.

Oh shit, well that would totally do it. That sucks.

Why?It's missing a few crucial details to be sure, but it's literally like two or three things. The game does a reasonable job laying out mostly everything else. I mean, it's a Platinum game, so it still does a better job of explaining itself that most other games in the genre. It is in that context that it was weird they somehow missed explaining such important things, especially when they're handled in a non-standard manner. Parry: Hold X and a direction towards an enemy, you usually have pretty generous windows for the input. Repeat to also block follow up attacks. Dodge: Buy it from the customization thing and then hit X+A, or X+A and the desired direction. (The fact that it's described as an attack makes it quite confusing, but it's an attack with a ton of invincibility frames.) Then the color coding thing that i already detailed. (If the enemy's attack isn't color coded, just do whatever to block/avoid it.) I also don't think the game explains the lock-on or how you can swap targets with the right stick, but it's kind of clunky anyways. If you're fighting big groups, you're almost better off trying to manage the camera yourself. You can also move while in blade mode if you start a ninja run, hit Y, and then LT while sliding across the ground. (Not as useful as you might expect, it just feels really cool.) The ninja run also deflects bullets, but i'm pretty sure that's a thing the game does say. (For the PS3: A = X, X = Square, Y = Triangle.)

I honestly have no idea, i've heard plenty of conflicting stories about it. I'm fairly certain that a Club Nintendo account can't be used to recover your 3DS purchases, there's certainly no surfaced mechanism for it, though there might be some ill-defined thing Nintendo support is able to do behind the scenes. I think it's probably more important that you write down your system's serial number somewhere. The stories i've heard, that's what people use to recover their stuff through Nintendo support. There's probably some other visible, unique identifiers buried in that system too. Anyways, the rumor going around a while ago was that the 3DS will eventually get a firmware update that merges it in with the Wii U account structure. (However, that might just be wishful thinking, because even with the unified account structure on the Wii U, purchases are apparently still tied to the hardware and not to the account!)