You think their PR is bad? They showed 13 minutes and got more hype than anything huge AAA publishers could have drummed up with anything they showed.

 

These days, when I think small company, passion project, hype trailer despite early alpha... last thing I got excited about like that was No Man's Sky. It's pretty good now and all that if you like that kind of thing, but man, did it take a bit to get there.

 

Huge pledges on this upcoming game. Should have mentioned it earlier for people that might have missed it. Only five minutes or so left to pledge...
https://www.kickstarter.com/project.../eiyuden-chronicle-hundred-heroes/description

 

Anyone else playing Guardian Tales on Android/iOS?

I fucking love this game. I'd say it's the best mobile title I've ever had the pleasure to play. Basically a callback to old school Zelda adventure/puzzle dungeon crawler, with more RPG elements, and instead of being set in a fantasy world, you and your team of four sprite chars traipse through various pop culture settings overloaded with humorous references to games, anime, and movies. There's a Hogwarts world, a Mad Max world, a Kung Fu world and the ongoing event is a journey through Hollywood adaptations (reference settings include Batman, Kingsman, Star Wars, etc etc).

So much love and care has gone into this game.

Doesn't force you to participate heavily in the gacha if you don't want to, as the most powerful units in the game are actually all tier 2 rarity, rather than tier 1, but if you do want to go ape on the highest rarity units, there is tons and tons and tons of free currency every week.

 

Anyone else gonna play Genshin Impact? Out this month, looks pretty great if you can fuck with a bit of gacha. Coming first to PS4/PC/Phones and Switch later.

 

I've had my eye on Genshin Impact for a while now. Hopefully it'll be good enough to make me want to quit one of the other gacha games I've been killing my time with.

 

Alright, so, last week a 'mon collector came out on the Switch named Nexomon: Extinction. Since Bug Fables was excellent and I didn't play Sword/Shield at all, I decided to give it a whirl. Only €19.99, anyway. Quick review, for anyone who's interested.

I think this game is mostly interesting for two things: (a) being a Pokemon clone that does some things differently, so we can compare and contrast and (b) being continually patched.

To explain (a), I think it's best to start by explaining that a bunch of mechanics from Pokemon have been vastly simplified or slimmed down:

1. There's only nine (9) types: Normal, representing Normal and Fighting; Fire, representing Fire; Water, representing Water and Ice; Plant, representing Bug and Grass; Mineral, representing Steel, Rock, and Ground; Electric, representing Electric; Psychic, representing Psychic and maybe Fairy; Ghost, representing Ghost and Dark.
2. Everything has one type and one type only. No dual typing.
3. PP for each move is replaced by a Stamina bar, and each move drains different amounts from this bar. If you don't have enough Stamina for a move, your Nexomon fucks around doing nothing for a turn and gets 10 Stamina back.
4. There's five stats: HP, Stamina, Attack, Defense, Speed. That's it, that's all you get. No Special Attack or Special Defense or anything.
5. No IVs, no EVs, no abilities, no natures.
6. There's a very limited set of moves.
7. All evolutions are based purely on level.
8. Everything scales to "your" level. Encounters scale to some arbitrary level set by the devs depending on where you are in the story, as do the random trainers, but storyline fights have set levels (I think.)
9. No items, which have been replaced by 4 "cores" which are equippable items that increase stats.

These are good ideas in isolation, but together they create something that goes against a core conceit of the monster collecting genre.

In Pokemon, you have your starter. Unique monster, can't be found elsewhere (or at least not easily), guaranteed to be fairly decent combat-wise. In Digimon you've got your starting monster, which you can build up into a beast, even if they're not unique, simply because you've had them so long. There's other examples, presumably, though I can't think of any offhand.

In Nexomon, because of (5), there is nothing differentiating Nexomon A from Nexomon B of the same level and species except maybe moveset and, if you really want to be pedantic, a nickname. Your lovingly-raised Gekoko (Electric Starter) can be found, easily, in the wild. You can't find one with the exact same moveset, but that's not a glaring issue, anyway.

Worse is that the level scaling gives rise to a Catch-And-Release sort of playstyle. Average level's gone up? Just fast-travel to some place, catch a new Nexomon of a higher level, and replace all of your old set like they were last year's fashion. That's genuinely what some people have been advocating as their main strategy, and it really misses out on the bonds you can create with the little monsters and personalize them. If you want to make your old mons relevant, best get to grinding out five more levels for each of them! In fact, the levels scaling make it hard to find a mon you wanted because they've evolved by then.

More personalization would also resolve another issue: that the biggest difference between mons of the same type are their movesets. For example, I walked around with a "Drare" (fire-type dragon-thing) until it evolved, 20 levels later, into an Acegon. Then, because its moveset was kind of bad, I dumped it into the bin and moved on to a Lamparos, basically just Discount Chandelure, because it got a move that gave it a free +50 Stamina at the cost of a single turn. It's called Stamina Surge, and it's stupidly broken.

(Even then the movesets are super limited and you can't just relearn moves from a tutor NPC - you need to level up a few times, because the moveset cycles back to previous moves. A really stupid idea.)

The monsters are tools, not pets. You can trade away two mons for 300 coins (a few Super Potions' worth) and not even blink. Later in the storyline, big impressive monsters get killed and their trainers, who explicitly trained them up from birth to ensure their loyalty, don't even fucking emote because of it. There are no funny gimmick trainers, like the dude in every Pokemon game who has a party full of Magikarp.

While I'm bitching, let me add a few things. At first (it's since been patched) there was a bug where if your mon died, the enemy got a free attack on the next one. If your mon is frozen, there's a 30% chance they'll thaw out. If you don't use the item, you'll just be forced to sit there turn after turn after turn, it's ludicrous. Ailments in general are just overpowered, partially because they last after fainting as well (getting fixed soon). The creators want it to be "difficult" but apparently fun is lesser down on the priorities.

Now for the storyline. It's bland on both a macro and micro level, filled with dozens of characters that consist of two personalities: those who could've come straight from Joss Whedon with an extra bucket of fourth-wall breaking humour slathered on top, or those who are dour and have one obsession to focus on. For example, because the protagonist doesn't really talk, you're constantly accompanied by your talking cat, who has clearly been mainlining reddit like it was catnip and who comments on everything.

At one point, a boss claims her "boss battle was so hard, the players had to complain to the devs to fix it". That's genuine dialogue straight from the game. Garbage.

Basically, the things Pokemon could learn from this are honestly pretty limited. The officially-marked sidequests, I suppose, or the key items you get which raise your catch rate by 3% (stackable). Other than that, in the base game, there's not much to learn except, maybe, why some of the decisions Pokemon has made were good ones.

But that would be leaving aside (b) - the fact that the game is, as of this post, being constantly worked on. There was already a patch earlier, which fixed several bugs and dialed down the level scaling a teeny little bit. In future updates they're planning to include running shoes, STAB (not actually in the base game), balance fixes, and postgame content.

So, in summary, what's available now is roughly about worth the €20 I paid for it. In the future, maybe, patches will make this game something really impressive, but as is it's just kind of okay.

 

Not gonna lie, with all my complaints about Pokemon, it being too simple is not one of them.

A simpler Pokemon game doesn't really appeal.

 

I started replaying Odin Sphere Leifthrasir to get myself hyped up for 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. Revisiting OS is like reading a storybook full of fairy tales about the end of days. Vanillaware just might be my favorite studio right now.

 

They are the best artists in the industry, hands down. I think only Supergiant comes close (I love Arc System Works too, but it's less stylized).

Wasn't a huge fan of Odinsphere though. The constant perspective changes just made it hard to get into. Muramasa is prob my fav game of theirs.

How close to 13S btw?

 

I liked OS more than Muramasa because of that shifting perspective. The intertwining jigsaw of a plot is so much more fascinating to me than Muramasa's almost entirely self-contained stories. What's the point of having Kisuke and Momohime going on these parallel adventures if there's almost zero interaction between the two stories?

I was also disappointed by Kisuke and Momohime having identical play styles after seeing so much variety in OS. The Genroku Legends DLC of the Rebirth remake really added the variety that was missing. Okoi the catgirl was my favorite playable character hands down. But hey, different strokes for different folks

13S is scheduled for its worldwide release later this month -- September 22

 

I adored Dragon's Crown too, but having to play through the story to get to MP killed it early for me. I played it years ago, but when i picked it up recently and realised i couldn't play with my friend immediately i got so mad lol

 

Xbox caved and released their price first.

XBX will be $499 USD.

This was the long rumored PS5 price, so I expect Sony will breath a sigh of relief and release their price and November/December release date shortly. If they make the smart move and undercut to 449 for Black Friday pre-orders, they could end up thoroughly dominating this generation as well.

 

I don't think so. I think they simply match the price because I don't think they'll have enough units to meet demand. They supposedly will have at least 5 million for the global launch and 10 million by March... meaning they'll probably run out of PS5s to sell over the Holidays. They could probably even launch it at $600 and sell out and then lower the price early in 2021. This is especially true for the version with a disk drive.

 

You're telling half the story.

They have that other box (don't even ask me for the retarded names of these things) that's only 299USD that's supposed to be an inbetween power level that'll still play all the new games. I also read in the leaks before the confirmation that there were two payment schemes very similar to mobile phones. Something like 20-40 USD a month gets you the console with gamepass?

I dunno if that's been confirmed. I don't really care tbh, I'm very much in the camp of 'I have a PC, why the fuck would I ever buy an xbox?'

 

As long as PC's exist, Xbox will also be at a disadvantage to Playstation. I can get all the Xbox exclusives pretty much on PC. Games are more valuable than hardware.

 

I finished up the main game of Hard West last night.

Fun little XCOM-like with cowboys and cultists instead of aliens and psychics

It did some things to stand out -- the Luck stat as both a "mana bar" of sorts and a secondary health bar, the CYOA elements on the overworld map, the Cards of Destiny acting as both stat buffs and special abilities, giving each of the eight scenarios its own gimmick like Cassandra's precognition or Solomon's eroding sanity -- while not going too far afield. If you like shooting people and standing in grids, you'll dig Hard West.

You can tell it's a game from a smaller studio that didn't have Firaxis-level funding or manpower. It doesn't have anything close to XCOM 2's level of polish, but the devs still nailed the tone and presentation with Death's bone-dry, slightly sardonic narration and the sepia-toned illustrations to hammer home what a desolate, lawless place the Wild West was. Especially when it's being overrun by whacked out Devil worshippers and cursed relics. I also really dig the revolving protagonist lineup. At first blush, Warren and his father mining for gold and defending their farm from bandits doesn't seem to have anything to do with Diet Edison's quest to figure out why this suspiciously contagious insanity is spreading across the frontier like a virus, but it all comes together for a final showdown.

My biggest gripe is that some of the later combat encounters boil down to sniper battles. I like a good sniping as much as the next guy, but the game ratchets up difficulty by giving most enemies huge HP pools and high-powered rifles that can tag you from halfway across the map. It's only sensible to respond in the same way. If you wouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight, why bother bringing a revolver to a rifle fight? It narrows your options and makes the game feel repetitive in the home stretch.

Would I have played this game if not for the quarantine? Almost certainly not. Is it still worth playing? I'd say so.

I cleared all eight of the main scenarios in about 15 to 18 hours, and I've still got another five to ten hours ahead of me. I need to go back and redo a few scenarios in Hard Mode, unlock a few more special trinkets, and finish out the ninth additional scenario that was initially released as DLC. Then I might go for yet another run to knock out those weird achievements to 100% the game if I'm in a completionist kind of mood.

But however Hard West shakes out, Hellpoint is up next.

 

At this point the main draw for getting a cheap Xbone spinoff is to get free digital copies of whatever xbox/360 discs you have and play them after all these years, assuming some of them aren't also on steam. Even Halo is no longer exclusive, lol.

If they just made the xbox a modular pre-built gaming pc with a special windows OS running on it, they'd basically win from day 1, especially if they allowed other storefronts on it.

 

The main draw of getting a cheap Xbox is the cheap part. The main thing that Microsoft wants to sell you is Gamepass and if they get you hooked on that it doesn't matter from their POV whether you use it on PC or console. About Sony, I think that they very well may see all the money they're leaving on the table by not bringing their games to PC and start moving more of them over. I was pleasantly surprised when they moved Horizon Zero Dawn over and I think it may be beginning a trend.

 

No they wouldn't... People who want a PC will get their own PC... Why get an 'Xbox PC' when you get do the same thing with getting your own?

The only way Xbox could 'win' is if they had a host of killer IP ready to go at launch - they bungled that. They literally have nothing to go. Their big game will likely be Valhalla, which should be great, but also playable on ps5...

Whereas Sony will be marketing the shit out of SpiderMiles. Ratchet and Clank also looks incredible and available in the launch window. Best exclusive of all though imo will be Kena: Bridge of Spirits - from the sound of it, it'll be available around or maybe even slightly before PS5 launch.

Fable, Avowed (after playing Pillars 1 and 2, less keen on this) and Hellblade look to be years out still. Even Forza is year/s out. I don't think Halo is the system seller it used to be either, but even if it was, that's 2021 too.