Reinforcements

Phaedrus' Street Crew
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    16

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Reinforcements

  4. Posted

    Is sword art online one of those that takes place in an MMO? I've never really liked those. Too many steps removed I guess. There seem to be quite a few of them though.

     

    Yeah, if you're not into that kind of thing SAO probably wouldn't do anything for you, but I like I said, I do quite like the first half. It actually sells the horror of being trapped in a virtual world pretty well, and has an almost Groundhog Day-like arc, where at first the characters are freaked out, then they settle into a routine for a while, then they overcome their problems.

     

     

    I've watched one episode of Ouran High School Host Club and I think I'm hooked...

    I'm finding the characters both amusing and compelling, I'm surprised how much I love them all after only one episode. 

     

    Ouran is great. It's probably the anime with the third biggest gap between how good it is and how good it seems like it would be (first and second are Madoka and Princess Tutu).

  5. Posted

    It's for kids. But since I was watching it at 2 am that's probably all my brain could take at that point. I'm enjoying it, but I'm not sure it is good. I imagine there is much better thanks I could be watching, but they probably won't have dragons in them.

     

    It is for kids, but I think Avatar is great. It helps to know that it pretty much never stops improving over its entire run (and if you've seen the episode "The Great Divide" then congratulations! You've seen what is far-and-away the worst episode in the series.) I would even say that, as far as cartoons go, there are few better things than Avatar.

  7. Posted

    Nah I can understand that feeling but I still really enjoy it. By far the best "we're all in a video game" anime I think I've ever seen. I say that as someone who LOVED .hack as a teenager but pretty confident that I'd decidedly not love .hack now.

     

    I actually really liked the first half of Sword Art Online, but MAN did it go off the rails in the second half. I mean, those rails were sabotaged, halfway point just rigged with esplosives that send the train flying into a ravine filled with jagged rocks.

     

    It's not good, is what I'm saying.

  9. Posted

    I really dislike games that do this. Turned me off to Far Cry, it turned me off on the modern Wolfenstein games. I know that's their whole schtick, but I still don't want to deal with femme nazi wizard dominatrixes. It bothered me a bit about the latest Tomb Raider too, although that was way more telegraphed mysticism right from the start.

     

    Oh, it's interesting that you take it that way, because that's not actually what I meant - I'm referring to enemies that are terrible bullet sponges, and I wasn't considering the supernatural aspect at all. Though they do often go hand in hand. One game that comes to mind that becomes a slog toward the end but not because of supernatural elements is Mirror's Edge. All those SWAT guys... ugh.

     

    Also, this is apropos of nothing, but I was the person who sent the tweet about hands touching things in Thief. I am super stoked to cut a painting out of its frame and then run my hands around the frame to find a hidden switch.

  10. Posted

    Far Cry, Crysis, Crysis 2 all had this, right? (Except in Far Cry it was mutants not aliens?)

     

    Of those, I only played Crysis 2.

     

     

    I was about to make a "definition of insanity" joke here, but then realized Crytek didn't develop Far Cry 3 so that doesn't really work :(

     

    I actually played Far Cry 3 recently, and that one definitely doesn't do this. The enemies get stronger toward the end, but so do you. Let me tell you, I stabbed a lot of heavies in that game.

  12. Posted

    I dunno, there are for sure some good points here, but I still like all Dishonored's systems, and I definitely wouldn't agree that the chaos system detracts from the game in any way. I guess it's not really even trying to serve the same purpose as something like Infamous - and it CERTAINLY isn't trying to be Mass Effect or Dragon Age. Like I said, if another Dishonored included something more along those lines, I think it might be even better. But I like that it allowed you to play different ways - if anything, the nonlethal option was LESS well-supported - and that it actualy ackowledged your choice, AND that it commited to judging your actions, if only because so few games are willing to do that. Yeah, at the end of the day it's judging you mostly on fatalities, since that's all the game can do. I think more variety of choice could be better, really, I think more gameplay options is always better. Dishonored is already so good in that regard though that I have trouble criticizing it for that.

     

    Oh man, also, I thought of my least favorite thing ever in games - RPGs that make you choose your character progression over the whole game, like Dragon Quest IX, Etrian Odyssey, or Diablo II (to add a controversial option). Invariably the choices your making only reveal themselves over such a long period of time, and the systems are so opaque, that you either have to accept that the choices you're making are entirely arbitrary or follow a guide the whole time.

  13. Posted

    I don't know if I can agree that Dishonored's morality system is "dumb" - I agree it would have been cool if it were more fleshed out, with maybe some more branching. I hope they go that way in the inevitable sequel. But I actually like that it simultaneously never limits you or shunts you down a certain path, while actually applying some judgement to your actions, thus avoiding the Uncharted-style tonal dissonance. So many games are full of that dissonance, even games I really love like the new Tomb Raider, that it's really nice when a game manages to include violence while neither ignoring nor reveling in it.

  14. Posted

    I think more games need to take a page from Dishonored's morality system. I like that, on one hand, it's in the background and never pops up with dumb, "Do you SAVE the puppy, or MURDER the puppy?" choices (hi, Infamous!) and it doesn't constantly scold you or judge your actions, but on the other hand, they way you play does have an impact on the world, and at the end it commits to saying, look, if you got here by killing way more people than you had to, you're kind of a psycho and you're getting a bad outcome from that. And all ways of playing are equally valid - you can be as loud or quiet, lethal or not as you want. I like Dishonored.

  15. Posted

    I kinda though about sending an email about Link Between Worlds, until I realized that the real issue is that Jake hasn't actually gotten to the part of the game that opens up yet if he just got to the dark world, aka Lorule (which, by the way, A+ joke Nintendo). In Lorule, you really can do the dungeons in ALMOST any order, so I'll be curious if that will change Jake's opinion at all. That said, I think the way this game is structured is only a partially successful experiment, and I hope in the next game they iterate on it, maybe incorporating the more traditional item-in-dungeon structure a little more, or trying something new altogether. I also think the game was marred slightly by being too easy - I literally never died, so the penalty of having your items repossessed was never keenly felt, though I came close a few times. Of course, I'm also not the person who's going to advocate strongly for any kind of "return to form" for the series - my favorite Zelda game is Twilight Princess, and I really don't like the original game, having never played it back when it was contemporary (I never owned an NES).

     

    Speaking of Zelda - this is me being a terrible pedant, but it drove me crazy when Chris kept mentioning how recent Zelda games had item slots that looked like the items. The only one that sort of did that was Skyward Sword, and it was just for four "passive" items, and you couldn't tell what they were by the silouettes.