Sno

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Posts posted by Sno

  2. Posted

    Unrelated, but Evo also starts on the 17th. (For the unawares, that's the Evolution Championship Series, a huge yearly multi-game competition for fighting game fans.)

    Lots of fun livestreams in the near future.

     

    TASBot is doing Ikaruga which sounds like its going to be bonkers.

     

    Oh my god, i need this in my life.

  3. Posted

    I think SOTN has a really terrific OST, so the notion that the music in that game is terrible is not something i can really abide by. The music in the entire series is generally very upbeat and anachronistic to its theming, but SOTN is kind of the least that of any Castlevania game, much of the music in its soundtrack is very ambient and eerie.

     

    The UI is terrible though, it absolutely is. Nothing is presented in the way you'd naturally expect it to be. It's clinging to Castlevania's confusing "hearts = ammo" metaphor as every Castlevania game does, but SOTN does it in a way that seems to rotate everything's visual presentation off by just enough to be incredibly off-putting. It's super weird and none of the other "igavanias" have this problem.

     

    Also, no, Castlevania was always super cheesy. It's a garish hodge-podge of myths and legends that alternates between pretty-boy protagonists and hulking schwarzenegger-esque heroes, and it's always set to some manner of rock and roll-infused soundtrack. It also takes itself seriously and has an elaborate and labyrinthine continuity. (Well, not entirely seriously, there's a wee bit of wink and nod going on.) It's kind of great. (It's great!)

     

    I bought it the other day in the sale. I had planned to play it after I've finished Aria of Sorrow (I'm about 5 hours in, and enjoying it), but after hearing your thoughts I might take a -vania break. Or maybe do Super Castlevania first. How does that compare?

     

    SOTN is worth trying, at least. I still think it's a really great game, but i definitely wouldn't put it in the same league as Super Metroid, and i don't think it's as great as the Sorrow games either. It's something of a flawed gem.

    Super Castlevania is part of the earlier half of the Castlevania series that fans generally refer to as "classicvania", they're mostly linear action games. Super Castlevania is generally fairly well regarded, fun and technically impressive, though it's often derisively cited as the easiest of the original games. (When it comes to people identifying the best "classicvania", i see people usually identify either the original Castlevania or Rondo of Blood, which Symphony of the Night is actually a direct sequel to, despite the totally different genre.)

     

    I wouldn't take my opinion as gospel. I'm probably biased because I think the theme is shitty. I really don't think it's a game for me though. I'll probably push through for maybe another hour but if I'm still not excited for it I'll drop it. 

     

    I'd really encourage probably giving Aria of Sorrow a shot, and if that doesn't click, Castlevania is maybe not for you. (Which i'm frankly surprised by, since you cited Rogue Legacy as a thing you really enjoyed.)

     

    Protip: Abuse the back step and the landing animation from a jump to cancel out of recovery animations on attacks for faster attacks! I don't remember if that works in SotN, it probably does, and i know it works in the Sorrow games.

  4. Posted

    Castlavania SotN doesn't hold up as well as super metroid.

     

    No, it definitely doesn't. I would argue that many of the GBA and DS games that followed in its wake have better worlds and better mechanical foundations. SotN has a real shotgun approach to its design, there's a lot of stuff in there that kind of doesn't fit and feels weird and maybe broken. It's certainly an impressive and memorable game though, but it's perhaps best looked at as a thing of its time, something that looked at Metroid as a way to reinvigorate a stagnant franchise, and ambitiously tried to be everything its inspiration was and more.

     

    That said, i think most fans would say that the Sorrow duology are the actual best Igarashi games. Dawn of Sorrow especially, despite suffering from some gimmick obligation as an early DS game while also sporting a seriously unfortunate bland anime aesthetic for its character portraits, has probably the largest and most interestingly designed world in an Igarashi Castlevania, as well as some really great and engaging systems. (Iga has spoken about probably looking to the Sorrow games as a foundation for the mechanics in Bloodstained.)

     

    Portrait of Ruin is also pretty great, it tries some pretty weird and crazy things with its mechanics, but suffers from the same bland anime art as Dawn and also some fairly bland environments. The scope of the game may have been a little overly ambitious, it's very large and maybe stretched a bit thin. Order of Ecclesia, on the other hand, is a beautiful and laser-focused late-cycle DS game with maybe the most refined action in the entire 2d series, but it's jarringly difficult for those used to only the metroidvanias in the series and also has a fairly simple and straightforward world layout as it's sort of trying to bridge "classicvania" and "metroidvania".

     

    The GBA games, Aria of Sorrow aside, are generally thought of as less accomplished than the DS games. (Igarashi claims to have not even been involved with Circle of the Moon, though it's actually generally better liked than the first GBA game he definitely was involved with, Harmony of Dissonance.)

     

    While all the GBA games are available on Wii U Virtual Console, none of the DS games are, and who knows if they'll show up given how Konami has been lately. (Which honestly really sucks, Dawn of Sorrow is the one i want to recommend.)

     

    Also, keep in mind that Iga's games also have a long tradition of bonus worlds and unlockable scenarios with entirely different mechanics, they're rarely over when they initially seem to be over.

  6. Posted

    He was such a unique entity in the gaming industry as a corporate leader who had worked his way up from inside the company, he worked on those early Kirby games, and even Earthbound. So much of what he did at Nintendo seemed informed by that, from his Iwata Asks interviews to a broad unwillingness to let individual development teams bear the weight for Nintendo's struggles as a company. (He had spoken about wanting the teams to feel secure in their jobs so they could be creative in a safe environment.)

     

    Totally a one of a kind dude.

  7. Posted

    There's a pretty big gap between the late high-rank weapons and early g-rank weapons, so you're going to have to settle for small optimizations for a while, probably.

    One thing you can probably do is figure out how to get some good skill buffs off of your armor, if you haven't already. Mix some pieces, slot some gems, get a better talisman, etc.

     

    don't worry about it! It took me 200 hours to get to G-rank!

     

    Yup, it's a huge game, took a long time to get to g-rank.

    The group i was playing with sort of lost cohesion during early g-rank though, so i think i'm probably done.

  8. Posted

    Clearing up a few details on Splatoon:

     

    1 - The game is largely built around a couple of public playlists, you can't do local matches or private online matches, the most you can do is join a friend's matchmaking party. (Or play a super watered down 1v1 local mode.)

     

    2 - People everywhere kind of stopped talking about it really quick, but the single-player game is very good, it sort of ends up feeling like a bit of a spiritual successor to Super Mario Sunshine.

     

    3 - Splatfest, the thing that happened on July 4th, was structured as a big "Cats vs Dogs" faction metagame. (Cats lost, boo.) The game's hub location is reorganized to look like a concert, different music plays everywhere in the game, and there's night variants for all the maps and battles are fought with glow-in-the-dark ink. Players who contribute more or belong to the winning faction earn unique items that can be used to upgrade or reroll the buffs on equipment. The community generally also just got super into it, there was tons of incredible artwork and gentle ribbing happening in the miiverse posts that populate the hub.

     

    The next splatfest starts on the 17th at 9pm pacific, will go for 24 hours, and the voting booth is already in the hub. (The theme this time is "Rollercoasters vs Waterslides".)

     

    Splatoon is awesome, people should play it.

  9. Posted

    I played Her Story through to 100% completion and i'm kind of on the fence about it. It's a particularly interesting experiment in non-linear narrative, there must have been quite a complicated script process to give rise to the subtle gating that occurs, though the structure of it wore thin pretty quickly and the whole thing ultimately left me feeling pretty unfulfilled. The presented narrative is so ambiguous and unreliable that you have virtually nothing concrete to take away from it upon conclusion, and i'm not even talking about the things that are being popularly debated about its story. It gives up virtually nothing, and though it then implies that this may be its intent, that doesn't make it satisfying.

     

    Certainly didn't hate it though, it's consistently surprising and it's well worth looking at for anybody who's curious, it's just more interesting than rewarding, perhaps? Still, I at least feel like i got a worthwhile amount of value out of it.

     

    :tmeh:

  11. Posted

    Maybe i'll figure out Moray Towers the way i finally got a handle on Arowana Mall, but i suspect it could just end up being a bad map for me like Rig and Port are. The rollers i was playing against though, they were all over those walls. Flying out at me from weird angles just all over the place. It was like a horror movie.

     

    I've generally stuck to shooters and blasters, but mostly shooters. (The luna blaster is ridiculous though.) I started out maining the aerospray same as you, though i prefer the splash-o-matic to it now for its consistent accuracy, but overall i've shifted over to the .96 gal and the dual squelcher. I'd like to pick up the chargers, but i'm a bad sniper, i'm always a bad sniper. Rollers, on the other hand, given how prevalent they already are, i don't want to add to that. That's just boring.

     

    The bunny-hopping is near-constant at high ranks, blasters and rollers do it basically nonstop. It's probably going to be a wall for a lot of people who aren't willing to play with the motion controls, not being able to jump and aim on the stick at the same time. (Nintendo clearly does not appreciate the wisdom of bumper jumper control schemes.) Shooters, however, can mostly get away with not leaning on it as a tactic since they feel the aim penalty pretty harshly, but it's something to keep in mind as a possibility for close ranges, it can be used throw yourself or others pretty off. (As for chargers, i'm not sure if you can even jump while charging.)

     

    It's not that hard to do, i find. I just... I keep forgetting to do it when it matters, i get lazy. I'm lazy. Also, muscle memory and all that.

     

    Another near constant at high ranks? The dynamo roller.

    I think that thing needs a nerf, it's probably the dominant weapon in the game, it has range that feels like it exceeds the longest-range shooters, has a massively wide arc, and one-hit-kills everything in that arc. It's insane.

    Theoretically it's balanced by its long firing delay, but it's only slightly longer than the time-to-kill on better shooters, putting you in kind of a "land every hit perfectly or get destroyed" situation. Except not even really then, they'll still get out their attack because of the lag delay and the best you can really hope for is either catching them completely off guard or nabbing a simultaneous kill.

     

    So the thing that theoretically balances the dynamo roller doesn't really effectively balance it in real world conditions, and things that work against other rollers, being conscious of where they're likely to try and camp or flank from and abusing well placed grenades or a range advantage, don't work against the dynamo roller because the thing covers so much ground with a single shot. I have been in so many games where dynamo rollers have had 20+ kills in games where mostly everybody else is sitting around 7. You see amazingly good players run a lot of different weapons, but the best dynamo rollers are consistent in a completely unreal way.

     

    There's also some vaguely exploitative hijinx happening with chargers getting faster kills off of attack buffs, but i'm willing to concede to them a rare advantage for the time being, because there's just not enough of them to really worry about it.

     

    Anyways, i'm probably still just a bit salty from those Moray Towers matches. Damn those rollers.

  13. Posted

    Shit, in my defense, i hadn't looked at the video recently. Still, i can't believe it didn't click that the clip of it driving was CG, it's so obvious.

    You motivated me to dig into it more, i could find precisely zero footage of the Kuratas actually being mobile, and while they have apparently "sold" multiple Kuratas "starter kits", it seems as though they may have delivered on none of them as of yet.

     

    Very interesting.

  15. Posted

    There are videos out there of the Kuratas driving around and it is quite fast and seemingly quite agile. "Suidobashi Industries" definitely seems like it has the advantage going into this thing, especially with how top heavy the Mk2 seems. The videos of the Mk2 coming out of the maker faire where it made an appearance made the thing seem alarmingly unsteady. There's apparently around 175k worth of work and material in the Mk2 as of so far, but it's an incomplete project, and smart speculation is they're using this duel as a way to drum up additional investors so they can finish their work on it before the event happens next year, while Suidobashi already has several years of experience making and allegedly selling the Kuratas. (Apparently with a price tag of around 1.35 million usd.)

     

    They're both obviously mostly for show right now though, it'll be interesting to see what evolves over the next year for when these machines are expected to perform in that competition.

     

    I know it's just going to be like five minutes of these things awkwardly flailing about until somebody's engine dies, but i can't help but geek out.

     

    I love that they're both so obviously inspired by fictional mechas. The Mk2 is clearly going for a Battletech thing, and the Kuratas is said to be inspired by Armored Trooper Votoms designs.

  16. Posted

    Rogue Legacy might not be a good at what it's trying to emulate, but as someone with limited experience of those things, it felt great. It could be a bad game, but it was really one of the first of that type that I tired and enjoyed. It is good enough at what it does that it pulled me in.

    I'm sure there are better versions of that, which I haven't found yet though.

     

    Have you played any of the GBA/DS Casltevania games yet? Or SOTN? Given how much of an influence they are on Rogue Legacy, it seems like you should.

     

     

    Weirdly enough I didn't like Shovel Knight that much. It's just too difficult to be precise thanks to the animations.

     

    I don't quite follow, the control response in that game is basically immediate in every circumstance, there aren't really any animations that should ever cause any issue. Or are you asserting that there's some hitbox/sprite dissonance?

  17. Posted

    A Special Charge Up in a main slot honestly probably gets you more meter on average, but Tenacity's drip feed sort of edges it out in situations where your team is struggling. Since it's the only mechanic in the game that kind of buffers you against having a bad team, i sort of like having it for that reason. (Of course, if you yourself are struggling and dying repeatedly, it's instead Special Saver that is useful. It is what will get you out of those situations where it's hard to build up enough meter for game-changing plays because your opponents have momentum and are overwhelming your team with quickly refreshed supers.)

    Also, i'm B+ now, hurrah.

  19. Posted

    I've already seen some people deconstructing and criticizing how the math used in determining the winner was handled, the Cats are salty about still losing after taking the victories lead on a numbers disadvantage. People don't think popularity should be a deciding factor, but Nintendo probably also need a balancing factor against people just grinding out wins all day.

     

    It was fun though, and I already used my rewards to roll a build i'm pretty happy with:

    Tenacity, Ninja Squid, and Ink Resistance as the mains. (Yes, it's definitely a tryhard build.)

    1 Quick Respawn, 3 Special Charge Ups, 1 Special Saver, 1 Ink Saver (Main), 1 Swim Speed Up, and 2 Ink Recovery Ups as the subs.

     

    I leveled up some 1 and 2 star gear with brands that were going to more or less give me what i want, and It turned out about as close to perfect for my purposes as i could hope for. I'd probably want to lose some of the special charge ups for some ink saver (sub) skills, but i'm wary of doing any more rerolls, i already used most of my snails on this.

     

    Also, i played some Tower Control. That mode is super fun, you definitely want one guy on the tower and a few guys on the ground around it so everybody doesn't get splatted by a single grenade, but the way the maps complicate that by having the tower take weird paths out across gaps in the map on Arowana and Saltspray is rad as hell.

  20. Posted

    I don't really agree that it succeeds in hitting that retro feel at all, but i've already argued at length in other threads that Rogue Legacy feels considerably worse to play than a lot of the old games it's trying to emulate, so i won't do that again here.

     

    Kind of hated playing that game though.

  21. Posted

    Don't worry, it wasn't taken as condecending. I'm on the edge of being too young, many of my friends had a SNES or a Saturn?, but I wasn't allowed to have any sort of games console until I was deemed old enough, which meant my first was the N64.

    I have zero nostalgia for 2D games, and actively avoided them until recently. I don't have those rose tinted specs when playing 2D stuff, which means I can judge them based on merits rather than because they remind me of being a kid.

    I entered gaming with OoT, Golden Eye, Mario 64 (which I still need to finish) and Rogue Squadron. All of which were incredible entries into 3D gaming. Made it hard for me to care about 2D after forming my initial gaming opinions with those.

    Well except Pokemon, but that was an exception to the rule.

     

    That's really interesting, huh. I could also see the no-nostalgia-for-2d thing happening if somebody grew up primarily on PC games or something. (Though, even there, i grew up playing Commander Keen.)

    Me, i had a gameboy at a really young age and like... Metroid 2 was a formative experience for me.

     

    I've always felt that there are certain things that 2D games are just really good at doing. Like the way 2d games have a crisp, instantly readable spacial awareness. It's why good 3d platformers are so rare, while it seems to be hard to make a truly bad 2d one.

     

    But what you're saying about the 3D mario stuff, it's curious to me how much of that is potentially just what gets ingrained into us as kids.

  22. Posted

    The splat fest seemed to be flawed. I was on the pop team in the Eu, and I had around 8 matches where I had 3 players on my team. I don't know whether it was due to poor numbers on that team, or something else. But it kinda sucked.

     

    I only had two disconnects in all of the Splatfest games i played, which was shockingly solid connectivity as far as this game goes, but i saw a lot more of other people on either team disconnecting, though i never ended up in one of those "everybody but two people got dropped" games that people are talking about in random places on the internet.

     

    I played in the early hours of the splatfest though, it seems like Splatoon's connectivity gets considerably worse during high activity hours, there's definitely some server stress factors to consider here. Even when i got on again later at night though, it still seemed mostly fine to me. In general, i seem to have a better connection on the game that most people do, and i still find that level of intermittent oddity kind of unacceptable. Even in the best case scenarios, the netcode in Splatoon is kind of its biggest failing. If this was a Halo game, people would be making videos breaking down the mechanics of what's wrong and demanding that Bungie fix it. (Totally a thing that happened, and totally a thing Bungie fixed. Multiple times on multiple games even, Bungie was good about that stuff.)

     

    That all said, i'm sure a lot of it can probably be traced back to the Wii U strongly encouraging use of a wi-fi router, and people setting up that router and their system in contexts that have terrible signal reception.

     

    Edit: CATS LOST?! BOO! BOO AT THIS POPULARITY CONTEST.

    We even had more victories, but lost significantly on popularity?!

  23. Posted

    There's apparently over 800 new items in this update. Some of that will show up in existing worlds, but a lot of it is tied up in the new biomes and the new expert mode. (Which is a toggle at world creation that makes that world more difficult, it seems balanced for large multiplayer groups or already developed characters.)

  24. Posted

    So Comcept and Keiji Inafune just announced a project called Red Ash, meant to be a spiritual successor to Megaman Legends, and it's showing a not inconsiderable list of development talent returning from those games.

     

    The Kickstarter page.


    Oddly, there's a second Kickstarter page for a Studio 4C tie-in anime.

    The game project's a little slim on concrete details, it's all very high-concept. The way this thing was launched is a little unusual too, there was no lead-up or announcement as far as i'm aware, it was just sort of put out there. It's also happening too early to receive any real bump from Mighty No 9, which it is ostensibly tied into.

     

    I mean, but if this has the potential to more or less be the game Keiji Inafune has been trying to get made for years and years, that's exciting, i'm excited. The Legends series has always seemed to be the thing that man was personally super passionate about.

  25. Posted

    I don't know how matchmaking works for the opposite team - like if there's two lobbies, and your lobby gets rotated through the opposite team's lobby, or if there's one lobby for both teams, but it looked like the lineup of team dogs we were matched against changed after every round.  I'd like to believe it's because after playing against our Team Cat Elite Murder Squad people were like hm, nah, but it's probably the two separate lobbies.

     

    It just seems like it builds a party out of your faction members and then once that party is matchmade it additionally goes and finds a party in the opposing faction to match you against. Despite being in the same party for all of those games i was definitely playing against different dog teams after every match, i don't think i ever once played against the same dog team twice in a row.