[Maark Abbott]

I am getting absolutely LOST in Dyson Sphere Program, in the best possible way. Too easy to sink an hour into automating manufacture of something or other.

[Mentalist]

Me, losing 20 k in Geo, because I didn't kill my shadow after a Coliseum defeat: "meh, who cares, I haven't needed money for hours!"

-The game, 35 minutes later, after summoning Grimm Troupe: "Oh, you want to upgrade these Charms so they don't break when you die? TWELVE THOUSAND EACH, SUCKER!"

Me: FUUUUUUUUUUU......

The messed up thing is, you don't get any more Geo from a Coliseum fight unless you finish it. So the game literally replaced the shade carrying 20k with a shade carrying ZERO. Which is just plain evil.

Anyway, I maxed out my nail, and thanks to finding the Grub map, I have nearly all of them- just missing the one next to the last Sleeper in DeepNest.

I spent like an hour yesterday trying to get the last Lifeblood Charm- to do that, I needed to collect all the bonus Lifeblood masks and then get back to the Abyss without taking any hits. That was quite a mission.

Basically I'm delaying doing the thing now, trying to get my Hunter Journal entries unlocked and get everything else done.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 18 November 2022 - 03:48 PM

[Aptorian]

I'm not that enamoured with GOW: Ragnarok so I decided to buy Modern Warfare 2.

Only to play multiplayer games you need PS+. I'd let my subscription run out because I don't really care about the monthly PS+ games. But then I had a look at the games in the extra collection.

Ended up downloading Miles Morales, Bloodstained and Stray "for free". Basically making the subscription worth the money.

Now I'm playing Stray instead of GOW or COD. I love cats.

[Mentalist]

I remain incapable of beating Trial of the Fool at the Colosseum. That is most annoying.


I've found all the masks and vessel shards, and now I've fought Grimm to pick up the last Charm notch, too. Ideally, I can make something work with an extra Charm.

[QuickTidal]

So after finishing BOTW I was finally able to get into the game my wife got me for my last bday, POKÉMON LEGENDS ARCEUS, and it's such a blast to play.

Like I've not played a Pokémon game before as I never had the main system that had them back in the day (3DS), and I realize this one is a bit odd since it's in the past and not considered a mainline game, but I'm having so much fun with it! Just a really calming and enjoyable fair-weather game to enjoy in spurts.

I know they just released Pokémon Scarlet/Violet and I know there are bugs with performance right now with it....so I'll play this one for a few months and hope that game gets some fixes as I think I'd real like to try a mainline Pokemon game after this.

I play my Switch SO much more than my PS4 now...

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 28 November 2022 - 08:30 PM

[Aptorian]

Is that the one with the Giant Pokemon? I also missed the pokemon as a kid, so I've never played any of them. I can't say I like the look of the modern Pokemon games. Would kind of like to try the original game boy versions. They seem cute and simple.

[QuickTidal]

Aptorian, on 28 November 2022 - 05:53 PM, said:

Is that the one with the Giant Pokemon? I also missed the pokemon as a kid, so I've never played any of them. I can't say I like the look of the modern Pokemon games. Would kind of like to try the original game boy versions. They seem cute and simple.

I have no idea. I'm only a few hours into it properly. Still catching and battling small Pokémon. It takes place in the past of the game series, you're essentially creating the first Pokedex (catalogue) when people still knew VERY little about what Pokemon were.

I never played any others, but I do known that this one is an outlier on how it reinvented how the game was played and the mainline games are not exactly like this one.

And the ones I hear are the best on Switch other than this are SWORD/SHIELD and LET'S GO....SWORD/SHIELD looks wonderful and I'd like to play it. After researching a bit today, If S/V isn't fixed by the time I finish ARCEUS, this will likely be the one I dive into...most people find it wonderful and the best mainline game on the Switch.

I know people in the fanbase like the 3DS and gamecube games the best in the series, kind of makes me wonder why they haven't ported them onto the Switch even as is to allow people to buy and play them there at a discount...no idea.

The newest one (SCARLET/VIOLET) seems to have two problems...it's buggy and the frame rate can be shit on it (to the point where people are doing returns?) and that the world seems really bland and not nearly as nicely designed as some of the older games, SWORD/SHIELD included...I expect the first thing will get fixed to be honest....dunno if the second would bother me? The ARCEUS world is kind of sparse by dint of it being in the past when villages were much more pre-industry...but it doesn't bother me here, so maybe I'm not the one to ask, I dunno.

I hear this is due to the fact that the game company (Game Freak) decided to develop both ARCEUS and SCARLET/VIOLET in the same year? So the Dev team was split in half, ARCEUS came out solid, but S/V sounds like it was not ready to be released and Nintendo released it anyways to have a holiday title on the shelves?

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 28 November 2022 - 06:50 PM

[Aptorian]

Nintendo hates money and customer satisfaction. That's the reason why they aren't porting old games to the Switch.

[QuickTidal]

Aptorian, on 28 November 2022 - 08:05 PM, said:

Nintendo hates money and customer satisfaction. That's the reason why they aren't porting old games to the Switch.

Being like the richest company in Japan despite the terrible business practices means they probably don't give a shit about us wanting older games. LOL

I'm sucker though, I've owned every Nintendo system since the NES throughout my life, barring only the WiiU (we had a Wii) and the 3DS....so I'm one of the people who keeps them rich I guess.

[Maark Abbott]

S/V aren't broken per se - they're just glitchy. The glitches are kind of funny in an Elder Scrolls way. Frame rate is not something that can be fixed because it's a hardware issue - unless Ninty do a beefier Switch, there's no real way around that. Arceus benefits very heavily from being off-formula (i.e. stealthing around, no gyms, ambush capture, Pokemon literally attack you, rather than you leave home and decide to be the very best and beat up the gym leaders and the Team).


I don't think the development time was an issue; PLA is from January/February of 2022, S/V released at least ten months later.


FWIW I'm having fun with S/V, if you look past the jank then it's good fun. And I'm a Morrowind player so I am well used to jank, muthsera.

[QuickTidal]

Maark Abbott, on 29 November 2022 - 08:48 AM, said:

FWIW I'm having fun with S/V, if you look past the jank then it's good fun. And I'm a Morrowind player so I am well used to jank, muthsera.

Good to know! Tell me, would you say I should jump to S/V after Arceus, or should I jump back and do Sword/Shield?

Also, why does it take so long for Pokemon HOME to update to add the new games? Like I can add my Arceus Pokemon, but people say S/V will be 3 months out...so if you play and it glitches out, you could lose your Pokemon could you not?

[polishgenius]

Sword/Shield were very disappointing imo. Some cracking new Pokemon designs for it, but otherwise half-arsed almost everything. The graphics in S/V are absolutely laughable, and the glitches are silly too, but if it basically being the biggest N64 game ever made doesn't bother you, it's a much better Pokemon game than S/V were. It's true that the cities themselves are cooler and prettier than in this, where the focus really is on the open world areas for Pokemon to be in and most of the cities are villages with very little, but other than that, this is better in basically every respect. Including the fact that, like in Arceus, you can see the Pokemon on the world all the time (although you do have to battle to catch them, unlike there), whereas in the older games, the 'mons appear on the map only in the half-arsed semi-open areas, only some of them, and you still fight in tall grass. Also, not open world at all.
Also, while no-one is likely to be playing Pokemon for the story, this has some quite decent plotting, whereas Sw/Sh had neat ideas but... well, I barely remember it so eh.

I mean, possibly without going into it with the expectation of Pokemon actually moving on from the old formula, you might enjoy it more, they're not bad, but... they're a handheld 2D game dressed up in 3D. S/V as late as they are to doing it and as much as they tank graphically, move the concept on somewhat.

I would say that if you're coming straight from PLA you're far more likely to enjoy this on similar grounds to that than you are Sw/Sh. Far more freedom, far more open world, and even with the need to battle, far more of the experience of just tooling about, finding Pokemon. With, you know, your eyes.


On the HOME question: I'm pretty sure it's to encourage as many players as possible to play the game 'properly' and not just port over their teams from old games and hi ho. Mind you, I don't think it makes much difference to your glitch-out concern, since unless I've misunderstood it, adding a Pokemon to HOME removes it from the game you're adding it from, and adding it to a game then removes it from HOME? That's how BANK worked on the 3DS, anyway.

It does remind me though: when I'm home for Christmas I need to get a few quid gift cards on my 3DS account and connect Bank to Home and rescue my old Pokemon before the service goes down next summer.

Maark Abbott, on 29 November 2022 - 08:48 AM, said:

Frame rate is not something that can be fixed because it's a hardware issue - unless Ninty do a beefier Switch, there's no real way around that.

I don't think that's true. Sure, the Switch isn't powerful and that limits what you can get out of it, few games run at 60 and a lot of developers find keeping a consistent framerate hard unless they lock it out at 30 or whatever, but there are far prettier and more demanding games that don't have the issues this has. Hell, even Arceus doesn't chug like this at times. Put it this way, I'm so undemanding I barely ever even notice a framerate drop, but even I noticed when kids started kicking their feet at 5FPS or you got an eigth of a turn of the windmill between frames. Same is true of the pop-in- every game of any ambition on Switch, ported or otherwise, has pop-in at some point or another, but not usually whole mountains flicking into existence as you pan the camera round, or people popping into existence five feet away from you.

Whether it's fixable is another matter- I'm no game designer but I've seen people who have some knowledge speculate that it depends on whether it's because GameFreak just badly optimised what they have, or if they simply fucked up the design at a behind-the-scenes ground-up level. I do know there is one issue that causes it to slow more the longer you play that should be fixable, though.


I'm not saying that to put anyone off buying it, because I've been having an absolute blast, but visually speaking GameFreak have shat the bed, and it's not just coz of the hardware.






ps QT off the subject but have you played A Short Hike? It's a six hour game about a bird getting to the top of a mountain and yet it's as close to a distillation of what I loved about BotW as I've ever found. Sheer joy.

[Mentalist]

Finally beat the Colosseum, so now I can do other random Hollow Knight stuff.

[Aptorian]

Played through the intro of High on Life up until the player unlocks the bounty hunter suit.

Seems okay if you like Rick and Morty's style of humor. Lots of fucked up gimmicks and foul language.

Unfortunately when I got the city, every conversation, one of the characters audio dialogue would be muted. Since the dialogue is central to the game, I decided to wait to play more until there's been some updates.

[Mentalist]

Sliced my left thumb open on Mon night, so won't be doing any keyboard-intrnsive gaming for a while.

Guess it's time to do some more achievement hunting in AoE II DE

[Tsundoku]

Mentalist, on 14 December 2022 - 09:03 PM, said:

Sliced my left thumb open on Mon night, so won't be doing any keyboard-intrnsive gaming for a while.

Guess it's time to do some more achievement hunting in AoE II DE

I was waiting for your regular injury update. It wouldn't be a proper year if you didn't fuck yourself up somehow.

[Tapper]

Marvel Midnight Suns.
An AAA tactical card game (40% of game time, if that) combined with a Marvel themed soap opera (50%) with grindy MMO ingredient gathering (10%) to upgrade character cosmetics has no rights to be as good as this one is, but I guess that's what you get when you let the XCOM guys make an IP RPG. Probably my game of the year.

[Mentalist]

Got the achievement for keeping Tabasco alive in Montezuma 3.

1 more scenario in Montezuma, and I'll only have the Burmese left- plus the 3 last Battles scenarios (Lepanto, Kyoto and Noriyang Point). 2 of those also have special achievements, so there's a bit of work to do yet.

[Mentalist]

Got all the campaign achievements in AOE II DE

just a bunch of skirmish stuff now.


meantime, also started Devil May Cry 2.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Btw Death Stranding is free today at Epic Games.

I haven't played games in years but I picked up a copy.

DEATH STRANDING | Download and Buy Today - Epic Games Store

(Be sure you get an email confirmation it went through... if their servers are getting hammered it might be easier in a few hours.)