TheYoungCato

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About TheYoungCato

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  1. I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

    I'm playing through Grim Fandango remastered, I like a lot of things about it, but boy do I not enjoy classic adventure game puzzles. Had I not referred to a walkthrough, I would have given up on the game, and missed out on all the wonderful music, dialog, and visuals. All the same, I can't help but feel that I am somehow ruining the experience by not bashing my head against the puzzles until I solve them by sheer luck and attrition, and earning the parts I enjoy, absurd as that probably sounds.
  2. Project Eternity, Obsidian's Isometric Fantasy RPG

    I like how this game allows you to have your cake and eat it too regarding companions. I'm not a big fan of the Icewind Dale approach of having to create a whole party, but it's really nice to be able to hire customized adventurers if you want to try out a gimmick build. For example, I'm planning on hiring an Island Aumaua rogue and filling all her weapon slots with arquebuses, so when combat begins, she can cycle through and fire them off in quick succession before needing to reload. Another nice thing is that having two characters with the same class is not necessarily redundant, in fact it can be very useful. I really like having two rogues in my party, because double sneak attack cuts through an enemy's health like butter.
  3. Hotline Miami

    I find mouse aim clumsy because I keep losing track of my character's facing, which gets me killed a lot. Found sticks clumsy as well at first, but after playing though the first game on the Vita, I don't want to go back. With offscreen enemies, I find that with an smg or a shotgun, it's fairly easy to hit them once I know where they are, doing it with a pistol is tricky, though.
  4. Hotline Miami

    I find free aim is more efficent than lock-on, though it takes practice to be able to land shots consistently on target. I think that Hotline Miami is a game where aiming with a stick is superior to the mouse, flicking the stick in the direction I want to fire is just faster and more intuitive than mouse aim. I just played though the first two acts of HM2, and I've found it to be quite managable, I did sharpen my skills with a playthough of the first beforehand, though. I have to say that the soundtrack somehow blows the first out of the water, been listening to New Wave Hookers on loop. Also the Swan Siblings are the best characters so far, The chainsaw is like a knife with more range, and if you use gun bro to grab as much attention as possible, the combos get ridiculous.
  5. I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

    Speaking of Demon's Souls, I've been playing it, and I'm not loving it the same way I did Dark Souls. It seems designed to be incredibly irritating to the player. Like not even the Anor Londo archers are as annoying as Demon's is practically all the time. For example, in the Valley of Defilement, there's this huge pack of rats, they're tiny, nearly impossible to hit with most weapons, and if they bite you even once you catch the plague, which slowly kills you and can only be cured by an item that costs 2000 souls to obtain. And when you get past them, you have to fight this boss that's basically a giant mass of leeches, which has one attack where it flails its limbs around the whole arena that has very little windup and is impossible to dodge So after getting fed up with that, I go to the Shrine of Storms, get past the first level, no problems, get through some of the second, there's this shadow creature that can shoot a laser that sweeps the whole room and is impossible to evade, at that point I just laugh and turn off the game. I really don't mind a challenging game, but this isn't like Dark Souls, or God Hand, where the play is so engaging that I'm enjoying myself even when I'm dying alot, it's just tedious. Like, I feel the urge to keep playing it, but it's the same, self-flagellating urge that made me beat COD4 on veteran despite the utter hell of anti-fun it was.
  6. Idle Thumbs 178: CS Losers

    You throw Pug into a random name generator, you're gonna get gold. In my Shadow of Mordor game, I had a captain named Pug the Pathetic. He tried to bully some orcs into serving him, they said "not in a million years" and beat him up until he ran away with his tail between his legs. He met his end when a geyser randomly exploded in his face and knocked him down, allowing me to catch up with him. Really, the only way this story could be more Far Cry 2 would be if the geyser exploded in my face instead. god I miss having a clicky keyboard
  7. Super Smash Bros. (Spoiler: Snake Kills Ganondorf)

    I've been playing for a little bit, and I must say, I really, really miss having a c-stick. Not being able to dash into an up-smash, or being able to forward-air while moving backwards, among other things, is really hurting my games. Control issues aside, it's gonna be nice to have this next time I go to a convention. Also, I'm happy that two of the characters I care about have been buffed from their terrible, heart-breaking, Brawl incarnations, namely, Captain Falcon and (real) Samus, though right now I've mostly been playing as Lucina, basically just because she looks cool and is voiced by Laura Bailey. This is real nepotism in the gaming industry right here. He could've brought brought back Mewtwo or added in another F-Zero character finally or I don't know, something, but nope, we get friggin' Dark Pit. Hell, I liked Dark Pit as a character in Uprising, but c'mon.
  8. Can I have a step by step guide for connecting to the Idle Thumbs Mumble? This interface is completely baffling
  9. I'll try to make it, just have to figure out Mumble and Hamachi when I'm home from work.
  10. In this case, what is the line between exploitation and art? What are some examples of works handle this subject matter maturely, and what distinguishes them, substantively, from the merely manipulative?
  11. Idle Thumbs 157: Molymoto

    I don't know if Dark Souls 2 is harder, but it definitely pissed me off more with its crappy dodge roll and hit boxes. It's as if the hit boxes of the player character slightly lags behind the model, so often I'd get hit by an attack despite cleanly dodging it, which would never have happened in Dark Souls or Demon Souls. It's definitely one part of the game that screams "developed by B-team", and it's disapointing because a good dodge move is so important to 3d action games. On the decline of Japanese games: While it's true that the major Japanese publishers have been declining in relevence, I think part of the problem is that even when Japanese developers do great work, it often goes unrecognized by everyone except fans. Really, Platinum Game's entire body of work could be used as examples. Last year they released not one, but two incredible action games, Metal Gear Rising and The Wonderful 101. Looking at the GDC awards, The Wonderful 101 got an honorable mention for visual design and MGR got nothing (Surprised it didn't even get an honorable mention for audio, at least).
  12. Episode 232: Sid Meier's Gettysburg!

    This episode really brought back some memories for me, I'm really fortunate that my dad just happened to borrow this absolute gem from a co-worker one day and brought it home, else, I would have never played it. I was never much good at it, but as a simulation of combat in a very specific time and place, I found it endlessly fascinating. It helped me realize that there were far more to battles in that era than two neatly organized lines of men shooting volley after volley into each other. I'm a bit astonished at how specific my memories of this game are, such as the way unit morale was displayed with blocks, and how those blocks filled up with red as the unit suffered more and more battle stress, the way that crack units of like 400 guys were often worth divisions three times their number, the way that your battle results were tallied with shouts of "YEEEEE-HAW". I even heard the "Five more minutes" soundbite echo inside my head when Rob quoted it. Troy's description of Antietam helped me realize why I don't like many strategy games over a certain scale. if I have to micro-manage things like you do in Gettysburg, and if I have to spend like 10 seconds scrolling across the battlefield just to get the whole picture, I become discouraged pretty quickly. It's a little weird, but the original Ground Control and Gettysburg occupy a similar space in my mind. Both were games based around commanding units, in the sense of a squad or division, as opposed to a rabble, like in traditional RTS games, both games put importance on positioning, facing, and terrain, both games went at a more relaxed pace than Starcraft without becoming ponderous, and both games helped me gain a basic understanding of battlefield tactics. It's really, really unfortunate that there's nothing like Gettysburg, today. I find RTS games to be too fast for me, and I can never quite emotionally invest myself in the goings on of a grand-strategy game, they're just too big, too abstract.
  13. Idle Thumbs 115: Robot News

    The catharsis of body slamming a pile of fine china after losing all your souls is more than enough justification for rooms full of empty vases-this is actually the first time I've seen anyone discuss about how weird they are at length, which is a bit surprising considering everything else about Dark Souls has been analyzed to death. I remember thinking "this is strange" when I entered a room full of empty barrels for the first time, but that thought quickly left my head when I learned how fun they are to smash.
  14. The (Video Game Music) Nostalgia Thread

    This is like Tetris infused with the melancholia and strangeness associated with modern Eastern European PC games. And like those games, your immediate need to survive distracts you from all the weirdness. Why are there art-deco looking dudes hanging out in space? Ah who cares I gotta make lines to live!
  15. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

    Has the presence of Uplay been confirmed or denied? I don't see anything about in on the Steam page and I'm daring to dream that I won't have to create yet another arbitrary account just to play a video game.