Sno

I'm getting to the end of a solo legendary run that i've been intermittently making progress on. I am feeling that Halo 4 is, by quite a wide margin, the easiest game in the series. I'm not buying into the common criticism of Knights being horrible damage sponges. Those things will go down very easily if you're using the right weapons, which is honestly just about anything other than the precision rifles. I mean, just don't use weapons balanced around headshots if you're fighting enemies with resistance to headshots.

There is loads of great stuff happening on the 3DS right now.

The second i posted it, i had this moment of realization that i may have even already posted it once before on this thread.

I just don't know which side i should be responding to.

I love that "frothing demand" and "increases" are in bold.

One of you is arguing that Nintendo needs to do new things, one of you is arguing that Nintendo needs to stop doing new things. I don't know how to have a conversation here.

Yeah, of course, i'm using spoiler tags for a reason. Edit: On the topic of sexism in japanese games, i had a vague memory of a hilarious and casually sexist thing i had read a while ago, and a search pulled up this. Then i stumbled onto this as well.

Egh, well, i think the handheld Zelda games haven't been very good for a long time. I don't like Minish Cap either, and i think the two DS games were pretty terrible. I was speaking mainly about the home games, which i feel have been pretty consistently great. (I think Twilight has a really bad Wii version, and i think the direction its art took was a big step back from Wind Waker, but i don't otherwise have any huge problems with it.) I mean, and Nintendo has so much history, there's so many ups and downs. It gets dangerous to start talking about them in broad generalizations, on my part too. (Though Minish Cap wasn't even developed internally at Nintendo! It's a Capcom game.) Okay, but those Zelda games basically all follow that same structure. There's an overworld with quests that direct you towards dungeons, and in those dungeons you collect items and fight bosses that teach you to use those items, which you then use to further the progression towards new dungeons. Inside of that framework, i feel like the series is always trying new things, but it hasn't really ever changed that framework. What would Zelda be without that framework? I suppose that is the important question. (Or, if we're going to be that reductive about Zelda, why not apply that same reductive mentality to other games too? Suddenly everything starts looking really depressing.)

I recall that BioShock was sold as a "genetically enhanced first-person shooter".

If we're digging into the past, one of my all-time-favorite horrible IGN quotes is this nugget splayed out across the otherwise beautiful box art for Ikaruga. I was so angry when i saw that box art for the first time, i couldn't believe it.

I have never felt that "look at how old those franchises are!" is a fair condemnation of Nintendo when they're constantly doing new things with them. I find it kind of frustrating to see people decry Zelda as never trying anything new when each new game is so fucking dramatically different from the last. It's such a strange phenomena, and it probably has more to do with frustration over the fact that there's a few core Nintendo-isms that are never going to go away. (HEY LISTEN.) The Mario myopia doesn't really help either. NSMB and Mario Kart are pretty much the same thing every time, but the core Mario platformers and the Paper Mario series are always doing new things, for example. When it comes to Mario, you kind of need somebody to guide you through things.

I really disagree. I mean, even though citadel spaces in 2 and 3 are so sparsely populated and small, it didn't stop them from breaking them up with interminable loading screens. In ME3, there are loading sequences between different rooms of the normady on the same deck! All of the games have had absolutely ridiculous load times in the non-combat spaces, the first game just actually justified it with enormous places filled with things to see and do, people to talk to, quests to embark upon. I like having spaces to explore, and the citadel feels like a series of dioramas in the sequels.

I had a little over forty hours on the clock when i was done. (Not counting the 18 i lost to save corruption.) Sexism in japanese games is a weird thing. I think there's stuff in Metal Gear, for example, that is so completely worse, but Metal Gear consistently gets a free pass because everybody loves Kojima as a wacky story-telling personality. I mean, and none of it compares to how women are objectified in a lot of anime.

Barely functional squad AI, idiot enemies, a useless cover system, terrible balance, and sluggish control to top it all off. I still think it's a better and more interesting game than the sequels, BioWare lost more than they gained.

As i reflect on it more, one of the things that really stands out to me is the sheer amount of voice over they recorded for this game, and how good all of it was. Quite an ace localization effort. You know, and I really think it's a pretty entertaining genre story. I felt that 999 kind of collapsed in on itself right at the end, but i think VLR mostly holds together under the weight of its insanity. However, I think it also has a slower and less dramatic start than the first game. If somebody came in blind having not played 999, i could see them being bored to tears upon taking the first few hours at face value with no notion of what's to come. Even so, I definitely enjoyed the story in VLR more.

I think ME1 is mechanically just a much more interesting game than the sequels, it took so many more risks. (I, for one, liked the Mako exploration.) The sequels are clearly more competently made productions, but they pared things down so much. I mean, and all the pandering bullshit in the sequels, how you see things like Ashley Williams going from this to this. Or, you know, those long lingering ass shots on Miranda in ME2. I also take issue with the fact that the sequels are essentially framing devices for a lot of unconnected vignettes, i always felt like the first game had a stronger narrative core. Or that that phenomenal ME1 soundtrack that became just a little bit more bland in the sequels. Or them not sticking to their guns on the cooldown mechanic that they went to great lengths to justify in a particularly interesting way, just shifting everything over to a more convential ammunition model. (Maybe i'm the only person this really bothered, but it really bothered me.) Or how absolutely massive the city spaces were in the first game, and how much there was to do in them. (Though to be fair, the first game was also incredibly guilty of reusing a small handful of spaces over and over and over for combat encounters, and that certainly was halted in the sequels.) I also never really understood the hate for the elevator. I mean, seamless loading while your party members have an amusing little chat versus staring at a literal loading screen. I suppose it's a different experience with a sufficiently fast PC, but for a significant number of gamers, Mass Effect started and stopped on the 360. (ME1 came out on the 360 first, and since that's where my save was, there wasn't really even a choice about where to play the sequels.)

I like Mass Effect 1 most of the three not for it being a particularly great game, but for being the most interesting of the 3. The two sequels play it so safe and are so pandering.

I said i would!

Box art is advertising, it needs to sell copies, and that box art will probably sell copies. That's my thought on this matter.

There are definitely fighting games that go to great lengths to tell a convoluted story, and you see a thing like MK9 even being praised for breaking up its action with a ton of cutscenes. First person shooters have so much story in them because it's what people want. (Also, frequently, it seems to be what the developers want.) Okay, but for games that break it down to the barest essentials, I'm definitely reminded of Quake 3. (And specifically not UT, which still has a ton of dumb fiction behind it.) Quake 3 has essentially no context to it, it's a game that broke down everything to the very basest of elements, as far as a retail game could reasonably get away with. You know, and then you'd see pro players take it even further. You would see people who would mod the game so that they were seeing naked level geometry with uniform lighting, while clearly visible hitboxes bounded around throwing sprites at eachother. If you take it that far, i feel like you can lose something. A little context is important, even Chess is ostensibly a war game. When i play Halo, i don't give a shit about the Chief's personal journey, but i enjoy that there is a universe there to give literally any context to my actions. Still, specifically on Halo again, the idea of the campaign experience without the story, Reach's firefight mode was pretty phenomenal. A superb survival mode with an unprecedented level of flexibility. You had the ability to set up custom rules to modify waves and their enemy composition, adjust scoring mechanics, have skulls be enabled and disabled on the fly, define loadouts for the players, or even set it up so that you could have somebody playing with the AI's against the other players who are trying to survive. It's not in Halo 4 though, instead there's an episodic co-op campaign that has so far proven to be nothing more than Firefight stripped of its scoring system and customizable rules, with only pretty CG cutscenes to fill the gap. It feels like they took firefight and gutted it so they could cram a story into it.

I'm a little confused, I don't really see what it was in my post that is relevant to what you're saying here. You might prefer the direction those stories go in, but they are no less immersed in well worn tropes. I'm guessing you're more speaking to the line of conversation about so much of everything else specifically being a "hero's journey."

They were mostly going off on the commonality of the abusive precursors thing, which has for a long time already been a ridiculously common trope in sci-fi and fantasy. Assassin's Creed is kind of an edge case there, though Halo and Mass Effect do have weirdly a lot in common, but they're both pulling from a lot of well established tropes.

I recall that Invisible War's solution for Deus Ex's multiple, contradictory ednings was to find a way to make them all true. Invisible War's plot was a total fucking mess, admittedly.

Have you tried throwing grenades at the Watchers? They grab them out of the air with a little energy tether and try to swing them back around at you, but if you can hit the grenade with a bullet before they do, it's an easy kill. The watchers are also actually vulnerable to headshots, but like many other enemies, you have to eat through the shields first. The headshot dot on headshot-capable weapons will make it easier to spot their tiny little heads. (In all likeliness, you've probably already been getting headshot kills on them without realizing it.) As for the knights, unless you're carrying around any of the power weapons, they're weakest in mid-range combat. Use needlers for the super combine, plasma pistols for emp combos, shotgun/scattershot for riskier close range attacks that stagger, and don't ignore the automatic weapons either. (Shoot in bursts for accuracy! The suppressor is the only automatic weapon where this doesn't pay off, it is purely for close ranges.) Ultimately, it comes down to the precision rifles being very inefficient against the tougher enemies, and that's typical of Halo of legendary. (Excepting, i guess, the pistol in the original.) Also, definitely don't forget the weapon resistances dynamic, the whole thing about how plasma weapons are strongest against shields while UNSC weapons are stronger against soft targets. (I am not clear where forerunner guns fall on the weapon resistances, but i think they're strong against shields. The suppressor seems very effective against knights, but less so against the unshielded crawlers.) For those long sections where you're fighting only prometheans and seeing only forerunner weapons, use the scattershot and the suppressor against the knights, and the lightrifle against the crawlers. (I don't think the boltshot is very useful in campaign, though it's particularly evil in the competitive modes.) Also, the scoped fire on the Lightrifle is dramatically more powerful, but if you're just blasting through swarms of crawlers, the unscoped burst fire makes for easier headshots.

that looks hawt! And now this has been going around.. That's from ODST, which came out in 2009. Bungie, you clever devils, you.