We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

Secret of Evermore is pretty fun, and more challenging than Secret of Mana (which is the most similar game to it in terms of gameplay); the alchemy system is a clever and interesting alternative to magic, right up until getting reagents turns into a huge slog and you end up hoarding your spells for boss fights, which means they don't level up and are underpowered. Nice concept, but hard to implement well, and especially frustrating for the kind of gamer who wants to 100% it because it means hoooours of grinding for rare reagents and casting the same spells over and over.

I'm pretty sure the only reagents that aren't buyable somewhere are Meteorite and Dry Ice, which are only used for one spell that isn't even that useful. (And technically those are buyable but you need to have every Charm and spend 10,000 Jewels just to get a few of one.) You're restricted to three Atlas Amulets plus whatever you can find in chests after getting those three, but again, only used for one formula.

I agree that it's super-time consuming if you want to level up every single spell to max, but gathering reagents isn't the main reason why. As far as progress goes, you just need to level one spell up to 3 or 4 per world and you'll do fine.

If Ghost Trick's plot flying off the rails at the end was a dealbreaker for you, even though you liked the gameplay and art, then you won't like Radiant Historia either.

FFTA2 was fun! The gameplay is pretty easy but enjoyable, there's an enormous amount of content, and the character customization/multiclassing is really elaborate and interesting.

The trick is that you kind of have to go easy on the game, and make challenges for yourself. Missions don't scale with your protagonist's level, so you'll end up overleveled for a lot of the sidequests you do, which means you'll probably want to assemble a B-team of weird builds you want to try out. The character customization also allows for some really broken combinations (blood price summons with an element that heals you, any given King of Cinquleur, etc.) so you kind of have to discover those builds, laugh about them, and then not use them, or you'll make the game too easy for yourself.

Tales of Symphonia is definitely more enjoyable with a friend. The real fun of it is in the co-op combat, and also in laughing at the slightly awkward cutscenes and how the protagonist is Robin from Teen Titans. I never really got into the other Tales games, but I'd imagine they work pretty much the same way.

I mean, I guess there's a decent chance I won't like TWEWY either despite being interested in the mechanics, but that's just my luck.

I loved pretty much everything about TWEWY, the mechanics very much included. It's hands-down my favorite DS game. But as for its downsides, some people get sick of the protagonist before he develops, you'll have to deal with a lot of unanswered questions until the post-game content clears (some of) them up, and there are pretty frequent fetch quests. There's a lot of stuff you kind of have to just go with. Oh, and the female characters are all pretty good or better, but the cast is like two-thirds male.

But really, it all comes down to whether your soul burns bright enough with fighting spirit to rise up and make yourself a true Slammurai.

Half-Minute Hero is nice, but if you buy the Fancy Steam Rerelease, you absolutely do not want to run the game as is, and should instead switch it into retro graphics mode or whatever. The reason for this is that the initial release (which is what retro mode basically is) had four or five distinct and robust game modes, whereas the Fancy Revamped Graphics version replaced that with... three or four levels which have a gimmick, but are otherwise exactly the same as the "primary" game mode.

I can only assume that they didn't have the time to draw enough new assets or something, which... you know, fair enough, but it's still pretty bullshit.

Whoops, apparently I forgot to finish what I was going to say about Radiant Historia because I planned to come back and respond to that part but forgot to go back by the time I finished my other comments. Unfortunately, as that was several hours ago I no longer remember exactly what it was I was going to say.

I think that I was going to comment on not being aware of how high the prices had gotten (I was fortunate enough to get a copy from the first printing) but not being that surprised. Anything else I was planning to say would have probably boiled down to "it's really good".

In response to Godbot: as I recall, Superfrequency's big issue with Ghost Trick was that she didn't like the puzzles and the plot was the main thing she was sticking it out for. Then she found that disappointing in the end.
The plot in Radiant Historia definitely has its low points (well, generally they're more of "that really could have been done better" points in my view), but overall it's quite well done. Regardless, I'm pretty sure Superfrequency's main question here is "am I going to like the gameplay".

Yeah Fogel I should have said "Hours of grinding up money to buy all the things", but it's six of one. A lot of sunk hours if you want to max everything maxable, and before you get to a point in the game where lots of reagents are available in shops, you have the hoarding/underleveling problem.

Personally I preferred to spend the time and money on my new set of +2 Whores of Grinding

After having poked at it for a bit I feel like ranting at length about DK 64 and rare ware's obsession during the n64 era with 'gotta collect a bunch of meaningless trinkets' style platformers, because that there is a game that want's to be about five different games with constant backtracking through the same areas as different kongs.

To wit, on the intermarry of random bullshit for you to waste time picking up you have:

Golden Bananas (ostensibly the most important, but they have zero use outside of 100% completion and arbitrary milestone numbers as one final requirement for access to the next area.) Also each Kong has five bananas to pick up per level/world because of course they do. The other four can't pick up the character specific golden bananas because of uh... reasons. (mostly because their face/fruit ammo of choice is not plastered all over the trigger for that particular golden banana.)

Blueprints (Because golden bananas weren't mandatory enough, we have these little fucks that come in FIVE DELIGHTFUL MOTHER FUCKING COLORS, one for each of the playable characters. So you know, instead of just walking up, beating the piss out of the mook holding them and taking them back to the random jerk you trade them in for the pointless-outside-of-arbitrary-milestone golden bananas, you have to do it as that specific character, which leads us into....

Normal Bananas, also available in five colors which can only be picked up by the character of the matching color, and there's 100 of the fucks scattered about every stage for each character, and you need an arbitrary amount of them to trigger any given level's boss fight by force feeding a hippo until he's extra fat and that'll somehow unlock the boss door. This makes banana's important for game progression because you need to defeat every boss in order to get access to the next level...

Keys - because each boss has one of these keys to a cage with a big giant fuck off crocodile that will happily spaz dance until the next area opens up as long as you keep bringin' in the keys.

Banana Medals - Something you need to get because REASONS (those reasons being the jetpack coin), and you need to collect 75 bananas of a color in each level, so there's one for each playable character per level too.

Jetpack/Donkey Kong Coins - Because there wasn't quite enough junk to get ahold of. You can only access Jetpack if you have like a set number of banana medals, and then you have to get good enough at the game for like a specific high score. In the case of Donkey Kong you have to be able to beat the second loop of the original arcade game, which i guess isn't that bad but man come onnnn. And yes BOTH of these are mandatory.

Banana Fairies - which you can only collect by photographing which will unlock extras n' cheats for you. They literally have no in game use apart from giving you one last super secret golden banana if you catch all the giggling little fucks.

Coins - come in five colors which makes them character specific pick ups, which is kind of needlessly bullshit when you factor in you need to pay coins for new abilities and upgrades for each of the kong's (arbitrary and specific) guns n' instruments. (because of COURSE they need guns (for sub par third person/first person fixed perspective shooter action) and instruments (because character specific switches were not enough.)

So at the end of the day you have what is a bit of a mess - a good portion of the game is designed just so you end up spending a lot of time fucking about changing characters to comb over areas you have already been or to just solve one puzzle that involves two separate characters for no other reason than because you can instead of focusing on a tightly built game with one central character where the game could challenge the skills you've built up over the game instead of tacking new shit on every level. Like I guess Banjo Kazooie and Super Mario 64 did the same thing but they both did it *better* (to a degree, SM64's only bit of backtracking was basically just collecting the caps and then you could do whatever. Yeah there were red coins and 100 coin challenges but those were both level specific and only served in getting more stars, and Banjo Kazooie made both Notes and Jiggies actually matter.)

instead they throw a bunch of shiny shit at you and hope that distracts you from the pointlessness of it all.

not getting into some of the games character problems, it's kind of crap enough on it's own merits.

Is the non-shittyness of female characters being pointed out solely for my benefit or is this something everyone cares about now. I'm confused.

"Non-shitty female characters" falls under "non-shitty writing," which is included in "I like everything about this game." The bit about the cast being two-thirds male was for your benefit, but I thought it bore mentioning that despite that, the female characters are all fine or better.

Okay so uh I beat that one dancing game on Oracle of Ages. It wasn't impossible, just really hard. The chime starts like... some quarter beats after the example ends, apparently. So yeah I got around it (thanks, virtual console savestates).

Slightly ontopic: why why why not make Mario games more like Sunshine (or Galaxy to a lesser extent)? Ever since the second Galaxy, Mario has been slipping into nostalgia fetish. I mean, nostalgia fetish is fine for like secret bonus levels or some shit, but not whole games. Sunshine was at least completely original, took place in a new region entirely, and had a new mechanic (not to mention an actual story, which Galaxy carried on with as well). I've heard 3D World is great and all but I'm still uncertain about getting it because I feel like I've already beat it before. Many times.

I'd like to believe that part of it is that the economy isn't doing so well right now, and Nintendo wants to go for safe bets that they know everyone will buy, like cookie-cutter Mario and Zelda games, instead of new and experimental stuff that people might not like. Like how every single Xbox game is an FPS or cover-based shooter, and there are a million Call of Duty sequels.

The alternative is that Nintendo doesn't care about creativity anymore and just wants to make money, so I really hope it's the first one.

So um, maybe someone here can help me out? Specifically Phish because I think this might be his fault but he's not online right now
Almost all the freeware games I have that open in fullscreen don't work anymore.
If I try to open them, they "open", covering the screen in black for a few seconds, then they minimize into the taskbar icon. Trying to open them from the icon just makes it "open" and then minimize again. If I try to open it by right clicking and selecting the program, it will "open" and minimize to reveal it opened another instance of the game, so there's two "windows".
Game That Do Not Work Anymore include:
-Every single RPGmaker 2003 game I have
-Lyle In Cube Sector (I think that was made with Multimedia Fusion?)
-Also most of my games on Steam that run in fullscreen

why
i mean i don't know exactly when this started happening but it didn't happen before I tried playing FTB on Phish's server and we had to mess with the FTB launcher for a couple hours to get it to finally work
and I tried setting the settings in the launcher back to what they were, and my fullscreen games worked... for one day. And then they broke again. So I have no idea what I have to do.

Okay, my amateur advice as someone who had different problems relating to running games in fullscreen and who glanced at Google for a few seconds:
-Right-click on the icon for one of the affected games.
-Click on Properties.
-Go to the Compatibility tab.
-Try checking and unchecking different boxes there. My particular issue was solved by checking "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings", which basically fixes the size of the play area and makes the rest of the screen a black border. (Sometimes said play area is really tiny, but it's an improvement over what the game was doing before.)
-If that fixes the problem, do that for your other games, you're pretty much going to have to do this one game at a time.

I don't know if that will help, but it's the best starting point I can offer. Hope you figure out what to do.

Alright, I went into Compatibility and tried a couple things, and telling it to run in 640x480 screen res worked for pretty much every problematic game. I can't tell the ones on Steam to do that though, so they're still broken atm. Thanks!

I tried looking at the Launch Options, but it tells me it's for Advanced Users Only and gives me a box to write something in? It's not a password box.

Halfway through writing this I looked up if that's what the launch options window was supposed to do and it... is, I think. I found out how to tell it to launch in windowed mode rather than fullscreen, and while the games in question still launch in fullscreen, they actually work now.

I think that's it, then. Thanks for the help, guys.

That Alicia character is so cute. The main artist is from Mexico! Neat, i've never seen a decent indie game from Latin America.

Dat Metal Storm mech, holy crap.

Oh dang I forgot about Heart Forth, Alicia! Looks gorgeous.

Also that dude's MOCs kick ass. Makes me miss doing Lego stuff, though I obviously never had the creativity/number of pieces to do things like him.

(also also that Virt track is on point)


In other news: This looks really interesting. Basically it's a competitive online game where only 8 people in the world are playing at any given time, and everyone else is spectating. When you die, you are booted out of the game permanently , and someone from the audience takes your place. The audience can also affect the players in indirect ways, and there's a story to be slowly uncovered.

Basically it's the Hunger Games and even though it could be gimmicky I love the idea

nope gonna ride these one trick ponies into the sunset

New Phoenix Wright; headed by Shu Takumi, set in Meiji.

Hah, that's awesome. I'd love to see what kind of stuff they do with feudal-era murder mysteries.

I don't know much about the Meiji era, but I really want there to be a mystery that's only made possible by secret western 19th-century retrofuture tech. Like a really primitive phone that everyone flips their shit over.

New Phoenix Wright; headed by Shu Takumi, set in Meiji.

I don't know much about Phoenix Wright but as a history dweeb I find the Meiji period fascinating, so thumbs up

Related: My roommate and I were talking about Assassin's Creed the other day, and we were speculating about what historical settings would be cool for potential sequels. Thoughts?

Neolithic Europe

Maybe the French Revolution?

They are doing the French Revolution which confuses the hell out of me since there's no way in hell they can fit an entire extra Altair descendant into that era and I was doing really well on following the plot until now.

Maybe it'll be from some maternal lineage?

From AC4 collectible emails/intel/whatever

Patrilineal Line: Fifteenth Century - Italian Renaissance Sixteenth Century - Ottoman Empire Eighteenth Century - American Colonies / War for Independence. Nineteenth Century - New England and American Midwest.


Matrilineal Line: Twelfth Century - Holy Land / Crusades Thirteenth Century - Egypt and Northern Africa Fourteenth Century - Ashikaga Shogunate in Japan Eighteenth Century - French Revolution Nineteenth Century - Napoleonic Wars; Taiwan Twentieth Century - "Summer of Love" American Pacific Coast

In other news: This looks really interesting. Basically it's a competitive online game where only 8 people in the world are playing at any given time, and everyone else is spectating. When you die, you are booted out of the game permanently , and someone from the audience takes your place. The audience can also affect the players in indirect ways, and there's a story to be slowly uncovered.

Basically it's the Hunger Games and even though it could be gimmicky I love the idea

That actually sounds really cool. From what I've read, though, it's only going to be up for a set time period every day. That really would limit its potential audience.