Roderick

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Roderick

  1. Posted

    People, people! ARMS is pretty fun. I managed to grab a single Testpunch hour this weekend and enjoyed it better than I thought I would. Particularly how in the span of one hour I already managed to develop some tactics and went from randomly flailing about to waiting for openings. Since most of the people playing were beginners, it was an even playing field. And it was just fun, fun to do. I really don't like fighting games with combos and twitch gameplay, but this felt just deliberate enough, and intuitive because of the real life boxing you're doing, that I felt comfortable duking it out.

     

    Here's an accidental screengrab in the heat of battle. Master Mummy landed a punch there, but I unraveled his slow ass afterwards.

     

    18765657_1942602982677972_61533096795519

  2. Posted

    Good overview, SAM, nice to see you play it. It looks like something I'd enjoy! (Though I'm still worried that the environments won't be memorable/authored enough.

  4. Posted

    I have been seriously enjoying KADO: The Right Answer. It's running right now on Crunchyroll and it's very cool sciencefiction, devoid of any tropes. Frequently I don't even know what to expect next, because it refuses to follow any standard dramatic build-up, instead only following the conseuqences of its weird premise of a superdimensional being coming to Earth to distribute his amazing gifts to mankind. Also he travels in a weird giant cube. If that sounds like a good time, then KADO is for you!

  6. Posted

    Though I finished Rogue Legacy, I think I fall in that category, SAM. How's the level design in Dead Cells? RL was hampered quite a bit by predictable and boring levels that quickly became a chore to grind through. The playthrough (and raving review) Polygon gave Dead Cells caught my interest earlier.

     

    Coincidentally, I am finally playing through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the first time. It's a blast, so I'm definitely in the mood for some Metroidvania.

  7. Posted

    Feels like they're trying for a bit of Ex Machina in their Blade Runner. It's dangerous to judge a film on a trailer, but it seems like Leto's character is little too overtly evil instead of the far creepier dad-vibes Tyrell had. But we'll see!

  12. Posted

    Yeah, in 200 hours of vanilla Morrowind back in the day I never found out what the deal was with those propylon chambers and therefore never used them.

     

    The upside is that you don't really super necessarily need them. There are enough modes of travel to fit your needs, and some places should be really hard to get to. Otherwise, how is it an adventure?

  13. Posted

    I tried out the demo to MasterBlaster. BlasterMaster? Anyhow, I am very happy there was a demo, because now I know that I really didn't like it. It starts with an overly long Megaman 2-style cinematic with way too much writing [saying very little], and the gameplay I found overwhelmingly meh. Not particularly fun platforming or shooting. The only novelty is perhaps that there are various gameplay modes, and that there really wasn't a whole lot else to play on the Switch at first?

     

    Maybe other people love it and will proceed to tell me it'll grow on you.

  16. Posted

    I did that earlier this year, aided by a few graphical updates, and was not disappointed. It's a wonderful game full of detail and striking music and scenery. I lost quite a few hours there again.

     

    (Not with the Dwemer puzzle box though. I know where that fucker hides nowadays.)

  18. Posted

    The peyote scene is interesting to read if you've played Deponia, which features a very specific hallucinating-on-drugs scene set in a similar desolate industrial wasteland. Perhaps a Full Throttle fan (likely, actually) worked on it and decided to make that cut content come true.

  19. Posted

    I hope so too. I tried some rounds yesterday and though it was super easy to go online and play with random strangers, I had a tougher time setting something up with friends, without (I don't think at least) some rudimentary messaging system. Also: the individual Joy-Con are a pain to play with. It's not impossible, but it's quite uncomfortable for a game that requires quick reflexes and generally features a lot of frantic mayhem and jerking movements. Nintendo, hurry up with a colored/themed Pro Controller!

     

    In other news, Breath of the Wild got patched and now you can choose different language subtitles for your game! So we can finally play the Japanese version with English/Dutch/Whatever subs! Nice of them to patch that in. Details of the first DLC pack have also been released, but it's not very interesting. The Cave of Trials will probably be fun, but also not what I'm playing the game for, and the higher difficulty setting might be fun as well, but the fighting is probably not engrossing enough to make that worth it. I'm expecting more from the second pack, which will feature additional story content.

  20. Posted

    Ah, it was indeed a box. What made it memorable is that Morrowind doesn't guide you towards things with easy signposting, compasses or arrows. In Skyrim or any other modern open world game, you just follow the glowing icons that guide you towards doors and objects of note. Not so in Morrowind or earlier RPG's.

     

    For the Dwemer puzzle box quest, you are first pointed in roughly the right direction to find a Dwemer citadel in the mountains. Then, upon finding it, it's a dark and unwelcoming affair filled with bandits. The puzzle box is a tiny little gewgaw located in a non-descript piece of furniture on a difficult-to-get-to floor, and there's nothing that tells you it is there. You just have to scour the whole dungeon, and I for one didn't luck into it until way long into the affair.

     

    Now, it's not that this is particularly good game design. I'm just pointing out that for these reasons - and people might well become frustrated at this quest - the Dwemer puzzle box is a memorable achievement to find, it's something that many Morrowind players will wistfully look back upon and think: 'Goddamn, that was hard. But I was so happy when I found it.' That would never have happened if the thing had had a glowing quest marker steering you inevitably towards it.

  21. Posted

    Gormongous, I saw Your Name last week, and I fully support your view. I've not seen many other things from the director, apart from his earliest short some 15 years ago, and a longer story about... a girl fighting in mecha on alien worlds, while her boyfriend is still stuck in Japan in eternal train rides or somesuch? I forget.

     

    In any case, Your Name has some terrific characterizations going. And it's delightful how it switches up things at certain moments that throw everything you've seen before in a different light. On top of everything that's going on, the film also has the confidence to allow for moments of rest and quiet, to offer the viewer a moment of contemplation to unpack what's been going on. That alone makes for fun jumps on the sofa: wait, does that mean that we've been following X instead of X??

  22. Posted

    Fast travel is the bane of all modern open world games. From a player perspective it's just too convenient not to, or you have to be an idiot like me who stubbornly refuses to teleport in Skyrim. The thing is: doing that really forces you to live in the world and get a feel of the surroundings, but it's just too much to ask. Especially since from a developer perspective, having teleportation at your disposal means that you don't have to worry all that much about player progression in a geographical sense: the whole world is instantly available, so that strips a whole layer of world building out of the game.

     

    I loved, loved, loved how Morrowind did this. You had in-game means of traversing the world, but they were limited and ingrained in the game world. You had to be smart in employing them. In Morrowind and vanilla World of Warcraft it actually meant something if you progressed through the game and found all these places and quest objects, because you had to work for them. Nowadays you just teleport to the nearest marker and blindly follow it. And the stupid thing is, it's difficult to turn this off (if it even is an option), because the game is no longer designed to do it on your own.

     

    Remember the goddamn Dwemer puzzle box? In any modern Elder Scrolls game, it would be a simple quest that you'd forget as soon as you solved it. In Morrowind, it's an epic journey that you'll remember always.

  23. Posted

    Whelp, Nintendo is really, really, really not abandoning the 2/3DS, then, with such a cool new SKU coming out. I actually would miss the 3D, because I used it most of the time, even without a 'New' 3DS. I just like the extra layer of depth it provides, it makes the image seem just a little more crisp. But other than that: this is a great redesign. It looks just super appealing and sexy, and the polar opposite of what the Switch Pro Controller looks like (to wit a horrible, blobby black/translucent nightmare).

     

    And boy, clam shell!!

  24. Posted

    I welcome this difference. I actually think that gamers won't be swayed either way on a large scale. People prefer either digital games or physical copies. If someone is intent on having a nice row of games on their shelf, they'll pay ten golden coins more for it. And for digital-only people, it's only reasonable that the savings are passed on to them.