Twig

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Twig

  1. TRACKMANIA

    are you fucking kidding me nadeo why nadeo whyyyyyy all i want is a trackmania 2 that doesn't have all the weird shit surrounding it and isn't for some reason split up into multiple games ps nadeo i'd pay 60 bucks just to get it all in one package, none of this splitting up the community nonsense, okay thanks
  2. Jeff Goldblum

    what the fuck?!
  3. The music is really good! The core gameplay loop is solid, but I jsut can't be bothered to put up with the stuff I don't like anymore.
  4. Yes, I do not like the interface. It is old and awkward to worm through for anyone who doesn't immediately know where everything is because they've been playing for centuries. That's not even getting into how ugly the game is in general!
  5. I don't like Path of Exile at all. It is visually unattractive and the skill graph is dumb as heck. Also I know the expansion is good. Also every time I see people playing it I'm like man I want to play this. But I know realistically I'll only play hardcore and then I'll stop after a couple characters die and then I'll be out. I'm not the normal consumer for this kind of game.
  6. I wouldn't play D2 because that interface ugh and I wouldn't play D3 because I don't want to buy the expansion and I wouldn't play D1 because I don't have it. so what i'm sayin' is not me sry ):
  7. Haha, I don't think I ever started calling mobs trash until well after The Burning Crusade came out and I joined a new server with new people who weren't all that interested in raiding. Which is weird because the guild I was in before was a relatively hardcore raiding guild.
  8. Yeah I know the best loot tends to drop from bosses in D2 (I think that's less true in D3, although since I only ever played hardcore, I never cared). But my point was, those enemies can still provide a threat (in D3, anyway), even if they don't drop anything meaningful. That's wholly different from something that's literally only there to slow you down and doesn't force you to expend any limited (or even renewable) resources.
  9. I wouldn't describe Diablo as throwing trash at the player to slow them down. As the difficulty level increases, those enemies provide more and more threat, to the point that they're often just as, if not more, dangerous than the bosses. Well, in Diablo 3, anyway. Get the right set of characteristics (wall, pool of acid, teleport, fuck (especially fuck)) and you're fucked! I haven't played D2 in years but I think it's similar? Although I guess those aren't the "trash mobs" you're referring to. In which case I'd say the trash mobs serve the purpose of wearing the player down. Kind of like my previous example of Etrian Odyssey. All that said, I only play Diablo-likes on hardcore mode, so I probably treat the games significantly differently from you.
  10. It's definitely the only genre where there's often literally zero skill involved with dispatching whatever you might call trash. EDIT: "Traditional JRPGs", anyway.
  11. In my experience (obviously no formal scientific research!), it's generally true that people tend to simultaneously criticize the grinding aspect of JRPGs while also sometimes liking the genre in spite of that. Of course, I've also talked to people who like the grinding on worthless mobs, but more often than that I find people who love Etrian Odyssey precisely because every encounter is important and dangerous and intended to wear you down as you explore the world before eventually running into the boss and dying. Or is that just me? Fuck, Etrian Odyssey is so fantastic.
  12. I think it's a vague wishy-washy thing that can mean any number of things, but early on in the conversation someone suggested we try to set a hard line on what the word "trash" means in this context. I ran with that and set a hard line. And then the hard line kept shifting because people didn't want a hard line after all apparently! But all that said, I really have no emotional investment in the definition of "trash" whatsoever. I just think it's silly to say a word or phrase is meaningless just because there's no solid definition. If that were true, genres would be useless. Actually I take it back, I fucking hate genres and I wish we didn't use them so frequently, or, indeed, at all, so let's never use words to describe anything again!
  13. They just called it a sub. No amount of explaining what the word "sub" came from would convince them.
  14. I once had someone tell me a submarine sandwich is not a sandwich. They were completely serious.
  15. Good thing I've explicitly given examples that don't involve doing these things!
  16. I would say if it requires skill, it is not trash. Pointing and shooting is a skill. But then you could say most enemies in FPS are trash mobs because most don't drop anything useful, unless you count ammo which you are probably full on because that's how most FPS work these days.
  17. My point is that it's literally not mindless. You have to actually engage with the systems in a meaningful way. Pointing and shooting, in fact, is often the entirety of said systems. Sometimes it's throwing a grenade to clear out the most enemies possible at a time so it's quicker. You can't tape the shoot button down and walk away and kill everything successfully, unless you set it up so that everything comes at you in a corner, and you're using something with wide spread shots and lots of ammo... at which point it's definitely not mindless because you've taken the effort to set up this wacky scenario. But in WoW there are definitely times when you can literally just initiate the attack and watch the health bar go down while twiddling your thumbs. My version of twiddling my thumbs in that instance was running in circles around the enemy until they died, and then moving onto the next one. In JRPGs, it's mashing the A button while I check my phone for something. Both of these are passively ignoring most of the systems found in the game being played. I'm not bothering to use the terrain to my advantage in Wow. I'm not using the spells at my disposal. Etc. These two types of situations are very, very, very different from each other. Their easiness is where their similarities end.
  18. I certainly don't feel that way. RPGs embrace trash as a mechanic. Other genres don't! While FPS games might be filled with easy enemies, they still take a basic skill level to defeat. Pointing and shooting is not mindless, by any stretch. Dealing with a lot of trash in RPGs amounts to turning on the turbo switch for the A button on your SNES controller and going to make a coffee.
  19. oh god a deep dive into dragon ball on the latest beastcast yessss Austin likes Dragon Ball for the right reasons. Goooood.
  20. I think another key thing, in my mind, is that trash mobs take no skill to utterly annihilate. So, for example, a mass of zombies coming at you in Left 4 Dead, while generally easy to deal with on their own, still require the basic skill of pointing your gun at them and shooting. A trash mob is generally something that I can just auto-pilot on, which is why all of my examples are from RPGs. (That's sort of a flaw in RPGs in general!)
  21. Also extra mobs in WoW boss battles are colloquially referred to as "adds", not "trash". At least, they were when I played. There, they serve a purpose beyond just slowing the players down. It's a mechanic of the boss fight. That's different from mobs that just sit around blocking a path and are always easily slain with little to no effort from the party involved.
  22. The Ultimate Playthrough, Metal Gears!?

    There was that, too, but once that went away I definitely have heard a lot about MGS2 taking shit too far.
  23. Plus they're largely skippable once you DO know exactly what you're doing. So they're incredibly value early on, and don't pose a threat to time or safety later on (unless you're really careless). I'd agree that Dark Souls doesn't have trash mobs.
  24. I didn't know there was any contention regarding what a trash mob. As far as I know, my definition has always been the accepted definition everywhere I've been. You're all weird is what I'm saying.