Cleinhun

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    476

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Cleinhun

  3. Posted

    I've read Griffin's post about it and I get what he's going for, and in theory the idea of using "narrative damage" to build stakes is pretty clever. In practice, though, I don't think it actually works, mostly because it doesn't feel like they're being punished for choices they've made, they're just being put through the grinder repeatedly and unavoidably. I initially thought Wonderland was going to be a puzzle, and they would have to keep enduring punishment until they solved it, which might also have worked ok, but they found the lich and it's spend the last two episodes telling them just to wait for the signal, so I guess the solution is just "wait for this NPC to solve it for you". Also, as someone on the reddit thread put it: "Merle getting his arm hacked off by Magnus because he saved his friends from an exploding crystal is fun and interesting. Merle losing his eye because a random number generator landed on "lose an eye" just doesn't have that same impact."

     

    The episodes have still had some great character moments and goofs, so these episodes haven't been a complete slog, but I wish whoever DM's the next game can find a different way to provide tension.

  6. Posted

    Very similar interference occurred on this week's Video Games Hot Dog, of which Frog Fractions creator Jim Crawford is a host. This is clearly part of the Frog Fractions 2 ARG and the fact that the two podcasts are recorded in the same room on the same equipment is probably a coincidence.

  9. Posted

    A local pizza place was serving pizza with tater tots on it, I suppose it might make sense to put ketchup on that, or at least would not be more insane than putting tater tots on a pizza already is.

  10. Posted

    Dear god yes, this is made worse by how grating I find Tobi calling his ability "lassuu".

    I don't think he knows how to pronounce words. If a team picks Ogre Magi in a game he is casting I just have to turn it off.

  12. Posted

    Person of Interest does get significantly better in the later seasons, and a lot of that is because they introduce additional main characters which takes focus away from Reese, who is basically the least interesting parts of Batman. It never entirely abandons it's case-of-the-week structure, and the cases of the week never really stop being predictable, but as the show goes on they spend more time on the larger plot and character stuff. The show is really at it's best once Root and Shaw become regulars, especially Root, Root is the best.

  14. Posted

    Polygon has not reached out to Valve for comment and will not update this story when none is received.

     

    Yep, that sounds about right. I wish Valve would make any sort of single player game again, even if it's not Half-Life related, but it seems like even that is a long shot at this point.

  19. Posted

    Adding invincibility frames seems like such a bizarre change to me. Doesn't that fundamentally change how the combat works? Before, being good at combat felt like it was way more about positional awareness than about precise timing, but I guess now good timing can get you out of way more. I understand if they wanted to make the game easier (although I liked the difficulty where it was) but why not do that by making enemies attack less frequently or giving the player more hp, rather than change the nature of how you fight? To a lesser extent the faster medkits also feels like this to me, since I though the whole point was to make it so you couldn't reliably heal mid combat and it wasn't nearly long enough to be annoying outside of combat in the first place.

     

    The weirdest thing, though, is that this was a mandatory change rather that an additional difficulty setting. Unless there's some technical reason they couldn't do that I don't understand why they would.

  21. Posted

    All of the news of Hyper Light Drifter's frustrating difficulty makes me really sad. I was looking forward to this game since it's announcement on kickstarter, but I held off on buying it until I had read enough reviews, and I'm pretty glad. It seems like a lot of people are really finding it a challenge, and the response by much of the community is like "oh it's only really hard if you don't know what you're doing" or "I didn't find it that hard" - I don't really have the patience to play games that require one bajillion hours of failure in order to make my way through it. 

    For me it took about an hour before the game clicked with me, but once it did I started to enjoy it quite a lot. I understand not having the patience for learning a game, but this isn't like dota or something where you have to spend dozens of hours practicing before you can even properly play the game. I think that another part of the problem, and this is somewhat the games fault, is that the bosses are significantly more difficult that the areas they're in, especially if you have no upgrades. But the game does nothing to clue you in to the fact that you should probably warp back to town and buy the chain dash or the bullet reflector before fighting your first boss. In fact the game doesn't do a good job of letting you know you can even upgrade you character, it sounded on the cast like Chris didn't know what the gold squares were for (they let you buy upgrades in town).

  22. Posted

    Saw Midnight Special was pretty disappointed overalll but it has some good moments, like the opening a lot. I was looking forward to this because I love Take Shelter.

    Aww, I was looking forward to that one too, but I haven't been able to find anywhere it's playing.

  23. Posted

    Yeah, I felt that too. I think they must have started writing thinking they had more episodes than they did and they ended up with a story that was too long for the time they had. It's really too bad, since aside from that the season was fantastic. The only thing I can think of that might have worked is to cut the season down to a 4-5 episode miniseries that's just about the Blue Morpho arc, so at least it would feel like something concluded, even if some of those side plots were really good on their own. The most frustrating part is that the show's notoriously long production time means we probably won't get another season for at least two years.

  24. Posted

    I agree that Alphys got a lot more interesting after the secret lab section, but I still think the "look at this huge nerd" joke overstays it's welcome. I feel like she would have worked better as a minor character like the nice cream man.

     

    I get that it would have been hard to write a player character that fit the wildly different ways you can play the game, but that doesn't make it less frustrating to me, you know?

     

    And maybe I'm alone in this but I didn't find the meta stuff to be very compelling for the most part. Some of it worked, the way the Flowey fight breaks the constraints of the art was really effective, for example. But the way Flowey and Sans acknowledge your ability to SAVE came across as a few degrees too clever for me to take seriously.

     

     

    I feel like I should balance out this negativity with some stuff that I really did like:

    One of my favorite moments in the game is when you finally meet Asgore. The game does a great job of building Asgore up as a capital F capital B Final Boss. Whenever his name is said, it's printed in red. Toriel straight up tells you "Asgore will kill you". Papyrus says something about him being a fuzzy pushover but he seems nervous, or at least unrealistically optimistic. Various NPC's mention how much they love their king, but the game never drops the idea that he;s a serious dude who means business. The guy trained Undyne for fuck's sake.

     

    And then you see him, and he's a big warm fuzzy goat man, and he seems so genuinely sad that he has to kill you. He even gives you multiple chances to turn back, "I understand if you are not ready, I am not ready either". And when you finally do fight him he becomes an incredibly imposing mountain of a man, and the fight is quite a bit more difficult than anything so far. The game completely drops the humor at this point, too, it even changes your inventory items to have less funny names (the "bisicle" and "unisicle" are changed to "popsicle" for example). 

     

    My read on it was that he knows that sparing you at this point would mean he killed all those others for nothing and he couldn't live with himself if he did that, so he convinces himself that he just need one more, and it'll be worth it. That is a really fucking compelling hook for a final boss, and a lot of it is communicated through the art and music rather that being spelled out, and I just love it.

  25. Posted

    I finally played this game recently, and it really is as wonderful as people say it is. It's charming as hell and it's sense of humor resonates with me really well. I find myself thinking about it a lot, both because of what it did well, but also because the more I think about it the more I realize how many problems it actually has.

     

    That article about Alphys makes some interesting points about her narrative arc, but I think that even from a pure entertainment perspective she's the least interesting major character to interact with. Every time she's on screen it feels like the same joke repeated, and it wears thin pretty quickly. I think it's telling that the my favorite part of her character was her relationship with Undyne, since that's mostly due to how cool Undyne is (seriously, Undyne is the radest). 

     

    But the thing that I think is the game's biggest flaw is something that I haven't really seen mentioned. Isn't the fact that a game that is so much about funny dialog and making friends with wacky characters, has a (mostly) silent protagonist really fucking weird? The game, at 3 different times, drops you into a minigame about making friends with a character, but said minigame mostly involves being present while the character talks at you until they eventually decide they want to be your friend. This isn't even an issue of it being barely interactive (although I don't think that helps), but the PC hardly even has any scripted dialog to speak of. I played the game twice and I still have basically no idea what sort of person Frisk is supposed to be. Does she think Sans's jokes are actually funny like Toriel does, or does she roll her eyes like Papyrus? Does she actually think Papyrus is as cool as he thinks he is or does she just appreciate his enthusiasm? Why does everyone want to be your friend despite you barely saying 3 words the whole game? How did she end up underground anyway? Does she have a family or friends on the surface? The game doesn't seem to care to answer these.

     

    Anyway, there are a couple of other mechanical things that didn't work for me but this is already kind of rant-y so I'm gonna leave it for now. And I do think the good outweighs the bad pretty heavily so whatever.