dium

Gotta get this sweet Yello Joke back on the first page. Grass Starter: Fire Starter (I mean... starting Pokemon): The Other One: Images hotlinked from this Kotaku article.

I did beat him! After taking a detour to do other things, I came back and beat him very easily. Dark Souls! Now I'm in Blighttown and have been for a long while, making runs where I get invaded and manage to build up 30,000+ souls... and then lose them all by getting pushed off cliffs by seemingly random adds. It's discouraging. Dark Souls.

Yet I probably do remember close to everything you've ever discussed on Idle Thumbs. Podcasts are weird, man.

I could've sworn I knew that Uru = "You Are You" because of the Idle Thumbs podcast, but Chris and Nick seemed so surprised by that fact.

I did not; I may have signed up wrong? Whatever man.

The depths aren't that bad. I understand that curses used to be much more of a problem before some patch, but they were never a problem for me.

Part of what makes Dark Souls so remarkable to me is that I feel very bad at it; bad at reading attack tells, bad at timing rolls... in games in general and not just in Dark Souls. And yet I'm not discouraged from playing it, and I'm still having a lot of fun. This is also a source of apprehension, though, since I know things only get harder. Still haven't beat the Gaping Dragon because I decided to take a detour to beat the Moonlight Butterfly, which was very easy and a great confidence booster. That guy was giving me troubler earlier when I didn't know where I was going and fought him before exploring the Parish. This also gave me a chance to upgrade my weapon to +7, and to pick up a divine weapon for giggles (IDK why I'd want one but I have a suspicion I'll be glad I did that). Anyway, I am moving veeeeery slowly though this game. I wish I could get a real estimate of how long it's taking; accidentally left it running overnight so my Steam hours played is woefully inaccurate.

Yeah, I chopped off one of the gargoyle's tails so I know about the tail thing. Golfing Dragon definitely seems manageable, I think I'm just impatient. Similarly, a lot of difficult optional bosses have seemed "doable" but I just get so discouraged by how slowly their health bars go down, so I never really test that theory. I have one more gold pine resin (from a chest or something) but I'm afraid of using it before I'm confident I can win with it; the first two resins got wasted on failed boss runs.

It should be working, it's been working for me. Although I haven't played in a couple days. (I'm at the Gaping Dragon. He doesn't seem too hard, but he's got like a billion HP and I inevitably make a fatal mistake before I get him all the way down. Might be time to finally try summoning help)

I understand why consoles don't have backward compatibility anymore. I think it's the correct decision, if I ignore my personal desires and think about it from a business perspective. But the cut-and-dry reality for me is, if this console has backward compatibility I will probably get it. Maybe even day 1 purch. And if it doesn't, I may never. I have as many boxes under my television as I wish to have, and each has at least one piece of software that still gets regular play and would be sorely missed. So, considering there's no shortage of PC games that interest me and that I can play on my TV with streaming, it looks like I'm sitting out this console generation for the foreseeable future. And I'm OK with that. The other side of this is that I really like Nintendo, and I want them to continue to produce bigger-than-handheld games. I hope that, a year or two after the release of the NX, there's enough cool shit for it that I'm forced to re-assess what I said in this post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=uieM18rZdHY

Oh, I'm prepared. I've been prepared to die by all the dying I've been doing.

Almost certainly not your intent, but this comment was what got me to put my foot down and buy DS1. ;p It's a good time so far!

WHAT Well, okay, maybe this is a good thing. I had talked myself into buying and playing Dark Souls tonight but maybe instead I can better myself and lead a more fulfilling life.

I've not played any Dark Souls and would also like to hear people's answer to your question. That said, for myself, I think I'm gonna start with Dark Souls 1. My reasonings being: The original Dark Souls is, and will probably continue to be, the biggest cultural point-of-reference in the series. If I bounce off of Dark Souls hard after repeated attempts, at least I didn't pay $60 for it. If I really like it, I have more games in the series to look forward to without the awkwardness of having to go backwards

This thing is so cool. I think I'm gonna need to quietly ignore it until I can play the whole thing, though.

^ this is what it really comes down to, I think. Foggy isn't the first person I've seen pointing out the all-or-nothing criteria for the special endings as a possible flaw. Although others have seemed less intelligently critical ("what, I can't kill AT ALL in the pacifist run? not even a teensy bit of killing?") Of course, in any real world context, zero killing and 'a teensy bit' of killing are not remotely the same. I'm not necessarily making a moral judgement either... because even if you ignore what's 'right' or 'wrong' about any given situation, the difference between not killing people and killing one person is huge! I think it's huge. But in video games, often, it's nothing. I have less strong opinions about the criteria for the no-mercy ending (which I've watched but not played myself). In some ways it's more arbitrary, I guess.

This was the first video game I played in 2016. I agree, "kind of amazing" is a fair assessment. It's certainly my favorite RPG in several years. Which is, I must admit, not a terribly meaningful accolade coming from me: I haven't managed to finish a typical-length RPG video game since Mass Effect 2 (which is way on the short end of "typical length").

I picked this up. I stand by what I said about the old graphics 100% holding up and not "needing" an update. But that said, I like the new graphics more now that I've played with them. I pulled up the game on my TV to play with a controller, and in that environment the new graphics/UI/aspect ratio are definitely preferable. When I play with my face right in front of a monitor (like a REAL GAMER) I find myself wanting to see those pixels again. I also think the new graphics might make the game easier, in that it's generally more obvious (even before using the hotspot-highlighting feature) what bits of the scenery might be interactable. I'm not sure about this, though. I've played this game enough times that everything is pretty much memorized already.

o, damn

This is life-changing information.

I'm probably gonna pick this up at some point, both for the commentary and to atone for ~somehow~ beating it several times without ever actually paying money for it ever *cough*. But, like Monkey Island 2, this isn't a game that I feel benefits from a visual update. The original low resolution art is gorgeous. The new graphics are, to their credit, tasteful uprezes. But unnecessary.

It felt like roughly half of Skyward Sword was introductions or tutorialization. I eventually really liked TP and SS but I don't think I have the patience to replay either of them.

I will gladly own an adventure game (assuming the offer stands). On second thought, although the game looks very pretty and invokes a strong MI3 nostalgia in me, I don't know when I'll actually get around to playing it. So the code should probably go to someone who actually, definitely will.