Yasawas

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Yasawas

  1. Aye, I'm finding that now. I'm also pleased to see they've addressed one of the complaints I had with DSII (I loved DSII) in that virtually every enemy in that game attacked in a pattern of three swings before pausing. I sometimes forget this still and go for it and get beasted in the face. Also also, in 12 hours I think I've been parried more in PVE than in my preceding five years of Souls games total. Did a bit of co-op last night as it was the first time the servers had been up and it was smooth and fun, tried it again this morning and I got summoned OK but it wouldn't let me or the other helper through the fog door. After about 30 seconds I was dumped out with several thousands unearned souls in my back pocket. Cheers!
  2. About six hours into the PS4 version now, it's a lot of fun with the unfortunate caveat of a pretty rough framerate even on the latest patch and I'm not usually the kind to be too bothered by that. It's probably not worse than the PS3 games were at the time but it's a shame nonetheless as some of the locations I've seen even at this stage are very pretty indeed, in a grotesquely ugly way obviously, and it jars when I'm panning the camera around to take screenshots. Also I keep playing it like Bloodborne and getting hyper-aggressive once I get hit in a misguided attempt to regain lost health. That does not work at all.
  3. STREET FIGHTER 5 (PS4/PC exclusive)

    I immediately thought of this and couldn't believe upon finding it that it was over five years ago. Ooft. Other favourite moments are just Sako in general - remember when he started attending SFIV events and he was some mythical execution god casually doing the wildest things with Cammy/Rose/Ibuki nobody had ever thought of? That was pretty great. And he's always smiling. Daigo hitting Arturo's Dhalsim's stand HP with cr.HP xx super from more or less full screen. Ricky Ortiz vs Wolfkrone "What are you standing up for?" A European taking Evo. I have loved SFIV, it's probably my most played game this generation, and if you factor in the amount of time I've spent watching it and reading about it then it borders on the ridiculous. It's amazing to think how far we've come as when the first SFIV Evo was held Twitch didn't exist (or barely did) and the only way to see it was by subscribing to IGN who put up videos in dribs and drabs weeks after the event - and I still did it and was grateful! Now there are majors every month at least and international players are expected and not a novelty. I can't play fighters as much these days and do not expect to get into SFV anywhere near as much but I've enjoyed the betas and look forward to hopefully more of the same but with a sizeable influx of new players as I don't expect IV to die anytime soon.
  4. Quitter's Club: Don't be ashamed to quit the game.

    I can't decide whether to continue with Majora's Mask 3D. Having waited years to play it (and ten months since buying it for various reasons!) I can’t decide if I’m enjoying myself or not. Basically I’ve done two dungeons and they’ve been really solid, everything I like about Zelda games. The rest of it, with the reliance on sidequests and the three-day cycle I think is a fantastic idea and absolutely no fun at all. I’ve dabbled – I did the Goron race, found it frustrating but won and knew what the prize was for. Couldn’t use it though as it was day three and it needs to be used on day one so I reset the cycle, lose the prize then have to fight a boss again (incidentally not a great one), do the shitty race again then make use of it. So I have a pretty rad item now but I’m not sure it was worth 20 minutes of my life, even if I was on a train and would probably just have wasted it anyway. I’ve never been a guy to do much of this in most games and certainly not Zelda ones. In short – how fucked will I be if I ignore as much of the sidequesty stuff and mask collection as I can? I worry it might let me get to the last boss then turn into Jet Force Gemini and I’ll have wasted all that time.
  5. RetroThumbs

    Aye, they're fine. The PS2 can use PS3 cables and in my opinion still looks great on an HDTV. The GameCube does have its own component cables but they cost over £100 last time I checked and no third party solution exists... Luckily Wiis are so cheap it's more cost effective to buy one of those with a set of cables and just run everything through the miracle of backwards compatibility.
  6. RetroThumbs

    See I'm the type of twat who'd probably buy that. Part of the reason I moved away from the SFC collecting was my increasing desire for a Framemeister Mini just to make it look its best. Happily PS3 component cables work on the PS2 and that thing still looks great to my eyes even on a big HDTV. S-Video is an American thing, isn't it? Europe used RGB SCART instead which I believe was better but off the top of my head the N64 doesn't output that, or only some models do or it requires modded maybe, so the PAL one always looks shit. There was definitely an output reason I didn't rebuy an N64 as emulating that successfully is pretty hard nowadays - even if you get the games running nicely then you really need to be using the proper controller anyway so you might as well just use the hardware to begin with.
  7. RetroThumbs

    Retro is my jam. I wish I had the money/space to collect something a little unusual like the Saturn/Jaguar/Game Gear or whatever. I know we're supposed to scorn physical media now but I still think amassing a large pile of musty plastic you can play video games on is cool. I went crazy a few years ago and decided to start collecting boxed Super Famicom games only. That got prohibitively expensive very quickly so I've changed tack and focus mainly on the DS and PS2 now which are arguably not retro but are unarguably cheaper and truth be told have far stronger libraries. I have fond memories of a ton of Mega Drive and SNES games but that stuff's easily emulated on the Wii U which is plugged in anyway and does a much better job of displaying it on an HDTV than SCART does so I'm over physical media for the 16-bit formats, nice though it was to play Super Metroid for the very first time in 2014 on all original hardware. I would love to put together a PS1 collection but making one region-free seems like a lot of work still. I think my best option is to buy a Japanese PS2 to go with my PAL one and then use the backwards compatibility of that, plus I get the bonus of the JP-only PS2 games I missed out on.
  8. Nintendo 3DS

    Oh man, I thought you meant you maybe had some idea of the story. You should get right in there. It is broadly similar but they've removed all the annoyances from the first game (you never have to do a puzzle room twice hooray!) and the way they help shepherd you toward the multiple endings as the plot unravels itself is probably my number one example of a video game telling a story in a way only this medium could. It's really something, so happy Uchikoshi is getting to complete his trilogy as it looked for a while like it might be dead.
  9. Nintendo 3DS

    What do you mean about having a wealth of knowledge about VLR? That you played 999 before it or that you think you know how the story goes? It's probably the best game on the 3DS, absolutely incredible. And I didn't like Hotel Dusk either, high five! We're the only two people I think. Seconding the Persona Q shout too, it's just an Etrian Odyssey game in fancy clothes but it turns out that's exactly what I needed them to do with that series to make me love one.
  10. Fallout 4 — Boston Makes Me Feel Good

    Really enjoyed the first five or six hours of this (PS4) given some of the doom and gloom I'd heard over the last week or so (I know I should stop visiting NeoGAF). So far it's Fallout 3 with a stronger start, a load of exciting-looking crafting bits, prettier than I'd expected and probably with less obvious bugs. The framerate is absolutely fine which was my main concern after some of the hyperbole I'd read over the weekend. The weather is hilariously bad here all week, I'm not back at work until a week tomorrow (it's my birthday!) and I have a new Fallout to piss about with - I might go shamelessly full hermit for the next few days.
  11. PL4YST4TION 4

    Aye I'd been expecting that to be about half that (it's down to £29.99 now btw) but then I didn't realise it was about the same price when it launched on PC and that it was getting a retail release too (albeit GAME exclusive). I bought it regardless only knowing that it was a bit Portally and have put about 7 or 8 hours into it so far, one of the best games I've played all year.
  12. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    The opening hour of this is so stupid and wonderful. I'm a couple of hours in now just having started the first mission proper and so far it's surpassed my expectations - it seems a lot more forgiving than GZ was at first which is nice as that was quite abrupt and I was getting spotted all over the place while I tried to adjust to the controls and it looks utterly staggering in places, easily the best looking PS4 title I've seen yet. I am pleased at my decision to not have watched any trailers of this as I've seen plenty of things so far that have made me absurdly happy. Can't wait to dump more hours into it over the weekend when I can just slob out properly without remorse. simplygames were always good but five days early really was the most pleasant of surprises.
  13. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain

    I've been working my way through the Ground Zeroes side-ops this week and having a hell of a time, some of them are legitimately fun and change things up pretty nicely. That game got a lot of shit but there's plenty there for £15 I reckon and the cutscene at the end of the Intel Operative Rescue mission is probably worth that on its own. I'm going to miss Kojima with nobody to bankroll his lovely madness. I wanted to extract all the prisoners so I had a sweet save to transfer over but my copy of The Phantom Pain is coming today apparently so that's the end of that.
  14. Recently completed video games

    On a Vita kick. Danganronpa 2 (Vita) - Loved the first one, rebought a Vita in part to play this. It is a bad game. For the first 25 hours it's an almost identical retread of the first but with awful, hateful characters and some really cringey fanservice bits that make it hard to play on the train. There is nothing in this part of it that builds upon the ending of the original so having had that nice twist you have to keep plodding on to get more backstory which is almost the whole reason I wanted to play it to begin with. Once you get there, the plot such as it is is shat on you in one big lump for the final few hours and I couldn't maintain interest in following it by that end to be honest. This is not Virtue's Last Reward, there is no clever twist, it's just a very average VN with some truly appalling trial minigames. You're probably better off just watching the anime to be honest. So disappointed. Sayonara Umihara Kawase Chirahi (Vita) - I mark a game as completed when the credits roll so this is counted even though I've seen maybe 10% of it and will be coming back to it for years yet. I've spent a fortune on Umihara Kawase games in the past and this is definitely the best package you can buy (I think it's called Yumi's Odd Odyssey in North America) being an improved version of the recentish 3DS game and including the classic Super Famicom original. It's pretty amazing. It's a 2D physics-based platformer (stay with me) where the gimmick is you have a kind of elastic grapple rope thing and have to use it to propel yourself around levels with multiple exits, so getting to the next level is generally pretty straightforward but getting to the special exit that branches off the map and unlocks further new bits is where the longevity is. It's impossible to convey how good it is to play but when you get a feel for it and can fling yourself around these levels in ways you couldn't have imagined at first it is the best. Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Vita) - It's the best rhythm game since Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and I don't throw that around lightly. I loved the P4 soundtrack anyway so I'm biased but the remixes here are very strong for the most part and there's a ton of them. Story mode is really meaty too, way more content than I'd expected, but I got exhausted with the amount of reading required so the finer points were kind of lost on me. Great stuff though, and I am already debating whether to buy the European version too so I can buy DLC which is something I never thought I'd say about anything.
  15. PS Vita

    I'm not sure but there are at least half a dozen options for that and the scratch sounds so there might be a silent one, I don't mind it! It's one of those things that's much less of an issue during play.
  16. PS Vita

    Imported a couple of games along with my 64GB card this week and a sleepless night of toothache has given me a good chance to get into them. Sayonara Umihara Kawase Chirari - Excellent, but I knew it was. I had the Super Famicom original, I still own the DS version and I bought the 3DS release of this but I wanted to play it on that lovely screen and my PSTV too. It's so sad from looking at the leaderboards to see that basically nobody in the West bought this as it's a wonderfully challenging 2D platformer with a huge amount of depth to it, I remember the 3DS European release price was a ludicrous £20 though so that probably never helped. Also it doesn't look great in stills, but holy shit what a game. Persona 4: Dancing All Night - Easily my favourite rhythm game since Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. I loved Persona 4 and its soundtrack anyway so I expected to be into this but I'm surprised just how much I am. Good number of songs, plenty of characters and references for the P4 fans and the core mechanics are simple and fit the format perfectly while enabling enough complexity for the harder levels to be an enjoyable challenge. Unexpected highlight so far - the jazzier numbers:
  17. Favorite Level in a video game

    I own that and I've never played it and having just watched that I have no idea why. Think I might finally set the PS2 back up this week.
  18. Favorite Level in a video game

    Oh wow. My immediate reaction upon seeing the thread title was stage one of Ikaruga, it's utterly perfect. A microcosm of simple and effective game design. I played little else for months, just gradually getting better at chaining, more confident about flitting in between tiny wee spaces, learning to absorb bullets for as long as possible before destroying enemies. And for no reason other than to see my score improve. I've never really been a shmup guy and no other game has made me obsessively chase a score like that but I have very fond memories of it and would rank it amongst my all-time top ten despite never having got past stage three on one credit. Second choice is Flashback on the MegaDrive/SNES, the level where you do the Running Man-style gameshow to earn money for a ticket home. It's been twenty years but I can tell you the password for it is RSVP. The main game is great anyway but this level distills it into a series of individual encounters and puzzles with no backtracking or story bits or flab and I used to keep running through it trying to do it as slickly as possible for no reason other than it was great fun to pull it off perfectly and stylishly once you knew your way around.
  19. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

    Ooh, I'll try and get on for this if we're doing a thing and it's kinda low-level. After a 50+ hour binge at launch I haven't played in months so I'm sure it'll go just great!
  20. I would actually be happier with that than another Dark Souls. I felt like Bloodborne was a great mix of previous mechanics with new ideas and much as I'd still play and enjoy another Souls, the prospect of another sequel, even led by Miyazaki, doesn't excite me that much. Oh God they could remake it and put the sixth archstone in and it would be the best.
  21. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

    I've downloaded all this DLC so far but I don't know where you actually find it, is it all high level quests accessed from the guild hall? I put 50 hours into this but haven't played it since April really, keep meaning to but I've been reading more on the commute this year instead. I basically ignored the online side of it (I think I'm HR2 ) and just did the story mode and now it's probably far too late to find anyone remotely near my level. I just want some sweet costumes.
  22. I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

    I signed up on XBox Live naively using my real name and surname initial and just immediately found it freaked me out enough to pay to change it out when people I didn't know called me by it, even though it was usually friendly enough. Except for that one guy (in my first ever online game, ever!) who sent me all these anti-Semitic messages because my name is Steve and I'm Scottish and apparently that makes it likely I'm Jewish. People are strange. This current one is the first song title I liked that I could have to replace it ("Rhino Jockey" was taken, sadly) and handily enough with the exception of Twitter it doesn't seem to have been claimed in any service I've signed up for in the last ten years.
  23. Imagine where we can take this if it's actually Demon's Souls 2.
  24. Nintendo 3DS

    Ha, Monster Hunter 3U was the game where I finally came out at work as a fully grown, basically normal man in his 30s who was not ashamed to be seen playing a child's toy on his lunch break. That series does that. There are a few people here who like games as much as me which is nice but none who own a 3DS, playing some local co-op on a break would be amazing. There are some secret 3DS owners who I get StreetPasses from but I never see them sitting in communal areas with their consoles whapped out and it'd probably be a bit weird to just wander up and demand to play them at a few frames of Mario Kart anyway. Games!
  25. Nintendo 3DS

    I bought that recently and had totally forgotten about it! I need to try it. It's currently doing that Nintendo game thing in the UK where having been full price since launch and occasionally climbing to £35+, has dropped in price suddenly meaning it'll likely disappear forever soon. I got the impression it was more of a flashy action-focused thing rather than another iteration of the 4 series.