We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Well, I meant nowadays and indie, not back then and pro :P

There is something to be said for the kind of magic that happens when investments are made in people instead of projects, though.

the dōjin game lifestyle will see a number of hypertension deaths in the near future, exacerbated by years of steady poortaku diet.

the subsequent invention of multivitamin pocky would go on to save millions

Niiiiice fighting game project from Japan. Only a day left for this campaign. Probably the only thing to come along lately that has made me regret not following the genre too closely for the past couple of years.

I wish they showed a bit more gameplay footage, it looks kinda neat but also really generic :I

The original’s been out for a while; you can find footage on YouTube. Not sure that’s going to tell you anything useful about gameplay, though (maybe a systems video will). Looks are deceiving.

(oh ex-industry-ers please leave my wallet in peace)

damn. you beat me to it

also, c4 counts as a smuggled weapon, and the act of planting c4 in of itself isn't considered a crime, which is all the more puzzling

the act of stealth killing with a bumper sword is actually worth it though

meanwhile, in bethesda's other RPG series the Elder Scrolls, Stealth OP

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Spoilerno seriously. the sneak skill and invis spells are super OP in the sense that if you sneak up on an enemy there is a near 100% chance you'll oneshot it and sneaking is easy as fuck with maxed sneak

Try a power fist with maxed unarmed and the death claw perk for your close stealth kills. That'll scratch that itch.

there's always that one skill that's super OP in every elder scrolls though.

Try a power fist with maxed unarmed and the death claw perk for your close stealth kills. That'll scratch that itch.

Something something unarmed death claw kills, scratch stealth

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Spoiler

So one of the rad dudes from Shut Up and Sit Down gave me a beta key for Card Hunter. Card Hunter, if you haven't heard of it, is a odd hybrid between a Tactics-style strategy game and a collectible card game. I usually don't go for CCGs, but this game has been getting lots of press lately and I had a key, so I decided to check it out.

Cool stuff:

You build your deck of movement, action, armor and skill cards by equipping items in an RPG-style paper doll interface. The weapon you choose, for instance, will determine the attack cards you get. Some may give you a lot of weak cards, or a few strong cards, or a lot of strong cards but some burdensome negative Trait cards, etc. etc. This is cool! Building a character is interesting.

I also like the whole "kids playing D&D in a basement" aesthetic of the game. It's fun.


Bad stuff:

I'm not sure that the combination of tactical planning and relying on a hand of random cards for your actions really works so well. It can lead to some interesting bluffing situations - do I move here, gambling on the fact that I'll get an attack card next turn? - but it can also make battles feel frustratingly luck-based. You can make a good, sensible plan only to see it ruined by a shitty hand. Often this will leave you with no choice but to restart the match. It gets old fast.


I want to like this game, I really do. It's got a lot of cleverly designed elements. But I found myself having more fun building a deck than actually playing. I don't think I'll be spending any money on this.

It's a shame, too, because after the death of the awesome Star Chamber I've been looking for another good online strategy game.

Has anyone else played Card Hunter and/or have suggestions for cool similar games?

I played a little bit of Chain of Memories back when it first came out and I liked it. Same with Baten Kaitos. (which does have some of the most cringeworthy voice acting and character designs of any RPG I've played, I'll admit)

I remember being intrigued by Lost Kingdoms, but it got poor reviews IIRC.

Never tried any of the MMBN games though, surprisingly! I'll have to check them out. Which one do you like the most?

edit: also I should clarify that I'm open to any sort of duel-your-friends type strategy game, not just deckbuilding games

Note that part of the reason the later MMBN games did worse critically is because they didn't change much. Having played them all and beaten most of them I can agree with Superfrequency: good gameplay, not so great everything else. I do like them though? Just know that the entire series is anime plots that end with Friendship and you're plenty prepared.

I wouldn't start with 4 or 5-- 5's got a tactics game latched on that's pretty alright, but it's a pretty different experience. I've not beaten that one. 4 just doesn't hold up as well, I think? It's tournament arc: the game.

The rest are all good starting points. 6 is really solid, probably my favorite but maybe only because I played it most recently. 1's a bit easier gameplay wise but is also a little jankier and there are a couple things related to internet-world design that are pretty awful. 2 and 3 are both good.

i guess we don't talk about starforce heh

tbh even though everything in general is silly in these games, it is easier to just enjoy it instead of criticize it for not being something else

(personal opinion: i prefer the simplistic stage layouts because i don't have to think about it too hard when i want to go somewhere by foot when I'm tired or half asleep while playing, and some of the more convoluted areas are just there to pad the length of game because it's easy to get lost)

I'll agree with the opinion. My Xbox library is puny compared to my PS2 and Gamecube collections. The only reason we even got one was because Microsoft was taking forever porting Halo 2 to the computer and Fable looked interesting. I recall Blinx was essentially the only other game that looked interesting, but I can't remember if it was any good or not. Apart from the time travel, it felt like another game similar to Ratchet and Clank or Jak and Daxter.

Judging from the price tag still on the box, it looks like we got our copy used for $5 during its generation. What's it going for now?

I remember liking lost kingdoms, but it was one of those games I played A Long Time Ago, when most games were games I liked. I got stuck on the boss of the sewer level :I
All I remember about Chain of Memories is that I was bad at deckbuilding. (Still am) (Why have I played all these deckbuilding games)

Yeah MMBN is just kinda good fun. It's obviously targeted at ten year olds but that's OK, I was one of those ten year olds. I was really into battle network Back In The Day.

I agree with you on simplistic stage layouts, weirdee, and my complaint of MMBN1's areas was more "why does everything look the same why is this place so big it's just blue lines in a featureless gray space". The later games split up the internet overworld into various regions with different tilesets, but the first game had sixteen maps that all had the same tileset that became blander and blander as the game progressed.

fakeedit: two posts while I was writing this o nooo

Getting lost was always a problem for me in the MMBN games. They added maps in for (maybe 4,) 5 and 6, but they were removed from the english versions because ???

re: XBOX library being the worst: BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MEGA-CD

Granolaman mentioning Rachet and Clank/Jak and Daxter made me think: Man, whatever happened to "animal mascot with attitude" adventure games? I'm sure they haven't aged well, but I have a certain fondness for them. I was all about some Crash Bandicoot back in the day. Why did they die out? Did the ascendency of console FPS games after Halo have anything to do with it?

Bajo kazooie isnt super good but it isn't shit, silly. Also they don't have enough 'tude.

It's interesting how popular character designs have gradually shifted from kiddy to angsty to gritty, it's like if developers have been making games for the same single generation.

I think it’s a little complicated. The core of the issue may well be that while the mascot sort of thing goes over well in Japan, it doesn’t by itself sell the games and maybe it never did. I was recently reading an interview featuring the guys who were responsible for making sure various PlayStation characters would have a successful design in Japan; one of them mentioned (this was c. 2005~2006) Sonic was more famous as an apparel character than as a video game mascot! (Sony was having the same issue with Toro.) And that the Sonic games caught on in the West before they caught on in Japan. And that by that time Crash was no longer that popular in Japan (they were more convinced that they had more success “growing up” Jak and Ratchet as gamers got older). And that the below-replacement birth rate in Japan was slowly killing the market for cute kid stuff, so they envied Nintendo’s ability to keep kids engaged with Mario (might explain a bit about why Nintendo hasn’t moved much since). Lots of stuff.

Just thought that’d be a bit appropriate to mention, since that seems to be about the time they left Nintendo as the only game in town on that front.

(It was a little disorganized, due to being a mostly uncut interview, but maybe one day I ought to talk shop with good character designers myself....)

A lot of Internet people these days (particularly with the present incredibly silly wave of 90s nostalgia that seems to be spearheaded by twentysomethings that don’t know nothin about nothin) really lionize that Nintendo–Rare partnership, don’t they? Personally I don’t think it was really all that. It was just good business sense while it lasted.

Rare had a proven ability to make games to order—note how a lot of their pre-DKC stuff was borderline shovelware stuff (that’s not to say they didn’t have creativity or shiny new SGI workstations by 1994, only that there was a method to the madness). They could make the kinds of stuff for the N64 that Nintendo wouldn’t dare/bother to make themselves, for a while. Eventually, the N64 lost market share, Rareware was basically repeating itself with certain releases, and it probably behooved Nintendo at the time to try doing something different—and perhaps they didn’t need whatever it was they were getting from Rare.

Perhaps they did, considering how the GameCube fared, but hey, Microsoft didn’t seem to get everything they wanted out of that deal, either—I suppose they might have been hoping Kameo would be a killer app in certain markets; they had a good eye making sure Halo would be an exclusive, after all (Well, the GameCube has more lasting titles on it than the Xbox, all things considered; sometimes bad business is good games too...).

Both Nintendo and Rare being fairly secretive companies, it’s hard to say what the real dirt is, though.

Granolaman mentioning Rachet and Clank/Jak and Daxter made me think: Man, whatever happened to "animal mascot with attitude" adventure games? I'm sure they haven't aged well, but I have a certain fondness for them. I was all about some Crash Bandicoot back in the day. Why did they die out? Did the ascendency of console FPS games after Halo have anything to do with it?

two words

awesome possum

what i don't get is the goldeneye fascination which was supposedly the predecessor to multiplayer shootins

that game is just utterly boring now

Bajo kazooie isnt super good but it isn't shit, silly.

I disagree, homeboy.

I really dislike Rare games.

Eh, Rare games weren't spectacular but at least they had some charm and okay-ish gameplay - oponions

Personally, i think people crap on Mario 64 more than necessary, at least as far as controls go; {IMO-SHIELD they weren't that bad IMO-SHIELD}. The camera was the biggest problem by far but it's still pretty playable.

I 'unno man cut 'em 64 games some slack.

E: Except Goldeneye.

The N64 (3D PSX games notwithstanding) sparked a minor revolution in “intelligent cameras” by showing they were necessary to some degree, and once we learned those lessons we promptly decided maybe Sony was onto something with that right thumbstick, and that using it to manipulate a monkey-capturing gadget was not quite it.

what i don't get is the goldeneye fascination which was supposedly the predecessor to multiplayer shootins

that game is just utterly boring now

On the console sure, but not on the PC. id Software singlehandedly set back IT productivity standards for years.

Other things Goldeneye did, rarely first but very influentially:
- mission-based shootan
- organic-feeling mostly-linear-but-not-entirely levels (e.g. multiple routes and rooms that are only there to make the place feel more real)
- rudimentary stealth elements so NPCs act a little more believably and fairly
- realistic weapons by the standards of the time (the scoped sniper rifle was a clever way around view-distance fog)
- adapted an existing franchise while neither making pointless deviations nor sticking to the movie religiously
- treat multiplayer as “party mode” with some cheats usable, weapons of varying cheapness, and Oddjob being short (you’d have to negotiate with the other players, basically)
- aim assist because analog sticks are not that great and the N64’s was very not that great.

On a certain level, a lot of people just like being James Bond, something the game pulled off convincingly for its time. I think you cannot convince people they are James Bond so well when they are doing the same kind of wetwork as other FPS protagonists. So you release this in 1997, bam, instant classic because James Bond is not Doomguy. You release this in 2010, James Bond is everyone you’ve been in an FPS for years now.

Can I just say how fucking amazing it is that Sunshine somehow managed to have seven worlds that were all visually and mechanically distinctive, and yet didn't rely on the same tired ideas of Fire World, Ice World, Jungle World etc and all felt like believable locations on the same island. That is not easy to do. I tried.

i really want the next super mario game to be more like sunshine than it is like galaxy

delfino island was really cool and fun and i would love to have another place like that over just some disconnected world places

OT:

CONFIRMED: Xbox One will make your whites white.