shmups.system11.org

As a former GungHo addict, and even w/o playing Let It Die, I both congratulate you and urge you to quit the game.

Well yeah but there's 351 floors...

Hmmm, 351 until the next update ?

o_0

w..well yknow. I'm taking a break from the game for a while but once i go back and beat 351.. if they do an update afterwards hopefully it will be when enough time has passed that i don't care anymore.

The fact that the last elevator is 50F, and you have to climb 150 floors until the challenge begins - once your character is maxed.. is frankly absurd. That's where i call bad game design, it's an insult.

Rad Mobile is kind of fun. Probably the least involving of Sega's sprite-scalers, but enjoyable enough. Still bummed that this was on the Astro City and not OutRunners.

Been spending some time with Wasteland 2. Please indulge me as a I rant.

On one hand I've only just completed the introduction assignment and returned to base, but on the other hand, I've fought through five or six large areas, found several other points of interest in the world map, and probably spent well over 15 hours on the game already, with everyone on level 10 or higher, so I think I have a good idea what the game is about by now.

And I gotta say I have no idea why people have been celebrating the game so much.
I should preface that I'm actually quite invested in the game. I want to keep playing whenever I have the chance, so it must be doing something right. But looking at this game critically, it does everything wrong, and I think highlights a ton of issues this whole family of games in general.


Right off the bat, I hate how everything is made unncessarily """complex""". Even ignoring the blatant bugs and complete lack of competent UI design, everything in the game comes down to an intricate web of stats and skills that all affect eachother. I'm glad I managed to find a recommended party setup on the internet, or I'd just have wasted my time with a lot of trial and error.
Now this can be exciting if it means that the game has a lot of different ways you can design your characters for different approaches through the game, and really affect how things play out. But it doesn't - The core gameplay is extremely simple. There's really two elements to it - the "tactical" turn based combat, and the walking around and figuring out how to get ammunition and other gear out of boxes lying around.
Occasionally you'll speak to people too, to get some exposition and help draw out the game world, but that part really takes up a surprisingly small part of the game. Most of the time you'll just be fighting stuff.

So yeah, you'll need to spread out and focus on different weapons skills to be able to cover all potential ground across fights. And I can totally see challenge runs focusing entirely on melee characters or similar approaches that might add a little to the game. But overall combat is very basic no matter how you go about it: Use up your action points to get in cover and/or attack the enemy. You can attempt to cripple the enemies in various ways to give you an edge, but it's always designed as a gamble that evens out the tactical advantage. It's not very involving, but it's entertaining on a basic level.
The exploration fares a lot worse. All your interaction skills are based on the P&P RPG inspired "chance to succeed/fail", giving each action a percentage rating for this. You can do stuff like pick locks, crack safes (two different things apparently), break stuff open, disarm explosives, disarm alarms, hack computers, repair machines, or repair toasters (again, two different things, and I think that's supposed to be a joke).

All of those skills work the exact same way - beat the percentage to succeed, or either try again or fail so bad you'll have to reload the quicksave you made immediately before attempting. The game practically encourages save scumming, which makes it confusing to me why you'd even have the percentage in the first place. Either make it so that you either meet the skill level or don't, or take away the ability to go back to earlier saves.
All the skills serve the exact same ultimate purpose, too, and it's never very role play'ish - Gain access to caches of gear, ammunition, healing items, or junk you can sell. Different skills will be required for different caches, so you either lock yourself out from some and specialize in the rest, or you cover the entire ground across the seven team members you can have, which completely nullifies the entire concept. Since the skills all work the same, the places that allow different ways to solve one problem, are essentially just allowing the same solution twice.
This kind of "choose your approach based on your invested skills" is rarely executed well in video games, but Prey 2017 IMO stands out of a good example of such decisions feeling much more organic. Wasteland 2 feels like they wrote the idea down on paper, and then never took it anywhere. Did I mention that the act of executing any of the skills all involve the riveting implementation of watching a progress bar fill up as you wait around. Why? I can think of no purpose other than annoying the player. Do people think this makes a game fun? Do people think Wasteland 2 is fun?

The interface in general just feels like it's trying to annoy you.
There's a lot of stats on the character screens, but rarely the ones you are looking for. And information about them seems like they are intentionally obscured so badly From Software would be envious.
Did you know the intelligence stat affects your ability to use healing items? Well, the game certainly doesn't want you to know. See a new rad suit for sale and want to see if it's better than the one you're already wearing? Too bad, once you equip them, they disappear from view. Want to see if the new weapon you found is better than your current one? You'll get some of its stats, displayed in different windows across different places of the interface, but the most important ones will require you to open up the "compare" window. Don't expect to compare your character's equipped weapons to the ones you see for sale though, if it happens to be equipped as their secondary weapon. You'll have to exit the shop, exit the conversation with the shop keeper, and then open the inventory to switch it out momentarily. Of course, all menus lag so bad you'd think you're playing remote play from a computer in Fiji, so this will take a while.
The secondary weapon also comes in play with the party wide reload button, which only works on the weapon currently in hand by anyone. So you'll have to switch to each character invidiually to swap weapons if you want to reload their off-hand weapons too.
Why you even need to manually reload between fights is a mystery in the first place, as there is no reason you'd ever want to not do that. Instead of just making the characters do it on their own, the developers opted to write a reminder on the loading screen. Is this "immersion"?

Wait, I'm not done. Let's talk about how healing characters works, because it's a glorious disaster.
You need to bring up your skill radial. Wait, close it again, first switch to your team's dedicated healer and *then* bring up the radial (this makes sense, but it's not necessary for any other skill). Pick the healing skill and cycle to the character you want to heal using the L/R buttons. Of course, I hope you didn't actually "select" the healing skill first, since you can't pick a character at that point, and you'll have to go back. You need to highlight the skill first, and then highlight the target character. If you did that before highlighting the correct skill, the selection will be reset, and you need to highlight them again. But before actually pressing the button to select it.
Then on the next radial, you'll pick the item you want to use to heal them. No indication about which one does what, you'll have to remember that from the inventory screen, though for basic healing that's done frequently enough that you don't need to worry. For surgery actions, it's a little more annoying. This screen also doesn't tell how many you have of each item, so if you're worried about wasting some of the more rare ones, you'll have to exit out and check your inventory screen for that as well.
Highlighting target characters isn't exactly intuitive either. The only indication you get as you cycle through them, is that their name pops up over their head and then lingers for a while, so usually you'll have multiple names floating there and have to pay attention to which one of them popped up last, which means you'll usually be cycling through every character at least once before ending at the one you need.

Of course it doesn't help that I'm playing the PS4 version, which was ported by people who obviously didn't care for anyone who doesn't want to play games without a mouse, and delibrately made targeting anything even harder than it has to be.


tl;dr
Everything this game does is done better in Divinity Original Sin. Everything. And that game definitely has its own slew of UI annoyances and game breaking bugs. At least in that game, different skills feel like different ways to interact with the world in a genuinely immersive way.

I've been trying to get into the original System Shock. It's... a bit of a struggle. I'm a bit spoiled because my first introduction to the series was the second game by a friend, and the second game vastly improved upon the controls and inventory interface to the extent that it's a much more engaging game.

Picking up items and reloading guns is especially tedious. For items, you have to click, then move the cursor down each time to the bottom of the screen to actually collect it. Reloading guns can't be done at the push of a keyboard button it seems, and you have to have the weapon interface open to be able to load or reload a weapon. It feels clunky, and honestly other FPSes of its era managed to feel engaging without needlessly making inventory management a chore (Wrath of Earth for instance).

The map design and environment textures are top notch, though. It's very, very interesting to actually explore and navigate Citadel Station. I think it'll take a lot of practice to actually get a handle on the keys, but once I do my experience should improve.

Cyberspace is also pretty clunky for a weightless, 3D floating environment. It's certainly no Descent, and appears to lack any way of moving backwards or strafing left/right, making it really awkward to move or fight in Cyberspace. You're constantly moving forward at a fixed velocity, with no apparent way to stop your forward movement (deliberate I assume given the time limits in cyberspace). The controls also change depending on if you're in fullscreen mode or not (fullscreen's better), adding to the weirdness.

I'm playing the Enhanced version that has built in mouselook/mouse aim functionality you have to keep toggling off and on when you pick up items. It still feels like the game would be much better with some further control improvements (there's no ingame rebinding options, you have to rebind with an external text file I think), but it's better than it would've been with just a keyboard. All in all, I can see a great game here, one that's bogged down a fair bit by a clunky inventory interface and control scheme.



Outrunners is indeed an exceptional game. Most likely it was left off to avoid complaints about lack of multiplayer or having to support multiplayer.

The modern remake of System Shock comes out in August. Probably better to put it down until then, I'd hate for the crappy controls to ruin the experience because in my opinion (tech advancements aside) it's the superior/more horrifying game.

I played it on PS 4 the first time with zero CRPG experience. Now that I have been playing some on my laptop I wonder if I could go back and play it on console.

2 is definitely a little rough around the edges but it was my first so I will always be partial to it warts and all. While playing 3 I was thinking how awesome 2 would be with 3's engine. That said the 2nd half of 2 is better than the 1st - but beware

In other new I picked up Divinity 2 a few days ago. I've put a few hours in and I think I am starting the wrap my head around it.

Divinity 2, or Divinity Original Sin 2? They are very different kinds of game
If it's the latter I think you'll like it a lot.


That'd be welcome. I think I managed to accidentally wade into a "too high level" area, and still managed to ravage the enemies there. Even though it felt like they were quickly killing my squad, it only took a couple of revives to get back on top while my melee tank just rushed in and beat everyone with her club.

What are you up to? I'm guessing your just about entering the beginnings of the mid game. Brawling (and to a lesser extent blunt and bladed) are excellent builds, especially late game. Few things are as satisfying as whacking motherfuckers with a bowling ball. Repeatedly.

It is Divinity OS 2. Honestly it was a lot to take in at first, but I am starting to get more comfortable with it. XCOM 2 is also on my radar, but with 145 hours in Wasteland 3 since 12/26 and another 25 in Dragonfall I kind of want a different setting if you know what I mean.

That said I absolutely plan on playing WL 3 again this year.

Aw man Ive started this game twice and burned out / lost momentum both times.
I think i'm on the second level on my current playthrough, got annoyed of not being able to see anything in the darkened areas. i think there's a way to turn the lights on but i haven't found it.

I'm enjoying it so far the more I get used to the awkward controls. The experience and atmosphere are worth it. There's an upgrade you can get that gives you a light that drains energy, and until you get it you can find light switches (or broken panels you have to repair to fix the lighting) and also use Sight Vision patches to get through dark areas.

Hopefully you at least have System Shock Portable. It wrapped in many of the patches and improvements made to the game after it's release. It allows for extended resolution support and key-binds, all kinds of stuff.

Check it out if you haven't. https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=211.0

I replayed Bayonetta 1 recently after snagging the pc port on sale.

I was kinda turned off on Bayo after getting really into Devil May Cry and then revisiting Bayo 2. Shit felt kinda nauseating (from the scoring system to the moveset to the emphasis on witch time) compared to dmc, so I didn't quite give it a fair shake and turned off after a few play sessions.

This revisit I had a better time with it. Still consider it a bit over-rated and that it exemplifies what are some of my most loathed design trends and mechanics in 3d action games, but I was definitely able to relive the charm that it carried on my original playthrough. It's really just a great little package that even if I'm not a huge fan of its overall playstyle and mechanics, does a good job of sucking you into the action through a seamlessly tied together aesthetic, story, and addictive gameplay loop.

I really want to play this just for all the Sega fan-boy stuff, but I don't think I've ever really enjoyed one of these 3D fighters in any meaningful way. Other than, funnily enough, Splatterhouse on 360. I was kind of enjoying the first 3D Castlevania entry also on 360, but it became very apparent that it was going to drag on for too long.

I've only played SS with its original controls. It's definitely messy and I got used to it, but I could never claim they were easy, lol. Thankfully it's never too frantic, so the drag/drop reloading and item stuff never gets too in the way. Definitely worth sticking it out and almost as good as SS2 imo.

Remake is looking good, but I'm kinda concerned with the enemy behavior. Like when you first exist the medical bay in the original those zombie fuckers just immediately start gunning for you. In this remake they just slumber around like idiots until you bash in their face with the pipe.

Bayonetta only really gets good on Infinite Climax IMO. Witch time sucks and it's a waste of time, training wheels my ass. Once you play the hardest difficulty you have to relearn the game all over because all that gimmicky slow mode teaches you is bad habits.

I wish the game had spent its entire campaign teaching you Dodge Offset instead. Bayonetta is perhaps the greatest dance simulator there is.

As someone who also doesn't enjoy "3D fighters" very much, I think Bayonetta is worth checking out. It's got a really interesting over-the-top feel to it that succeeds from an aesthetic perspective, including the gameplay. It's genuinely got a space of it's own to occupy, and I respect that.

Yeah it's a very nice package that instantly sucks you in. Great presentation, great pace, lots of variety, and it gives instant feedback for playing well.

It's still no Devil May Cry 3 though.

I honestly think Bayonetta is a better game than DMCanything, but that's mostly because I think Kamiya's enemies are more fun to fight than Itsuno's. But who cares? Both DMC3 and Bayonetta rock.

That's kind of where I'm at, though I don't feel quite as positively on DMC3 (it's a great game compared to most things out there but I really don't think it compares favorably to Bayonetta at all). The DMC games have some of the best player movesets in the genre but DMC3 in particular just has so many dreadfully lame enemies who aren't at all fun to fight on a fundamental level (and though you might be able to squeeze fun out of them by learning to style very well, it ends up being like squeezing blood from a stone). Bayonetta has worse bosses than Devil May Cry 3, for the most part, but you spend most of the game fighting standard enemies; it's more important that they at least be of passable quality (which I'd say DMC5's and a good chunk of 4's are).

DMC3 reminds me of Shinobi III. Still a quality game, but one that seems completely built around the idea that a player will want to master it and play it at its highest level, but without placing sufficient incentive to actually want to learn the game to that extent. Bayonetta is much better balanced in that it is excellent at beginner, intermediate, and expert levels of play. Bayonetta 2 is very, very flawed though; I might actually like DMC3 more than it.

DMC3's core enemy roster is fine (aside from a few stinkers like those stupid fucking fake-angels). The Seven Hells may all look visually identical but they all have unique movesets and actions which give solid variety to the fight. They're also not particularly passive and get more and more aggressive with each difficulty level. I'd not put them much lower than the parade of Affinities and Armored Affinities you spend most of your time fighting in Bayo, and at least DMC3's enemies consistently take hitstun instead of hyper-armoring through shit if you're not in witch-time. There's also always dmc5 for an even more wacky and varied enemy roster.

The main reason I say dmc is vastly superior to Bayonetta is more of a core mechanical and general design philosophy one. All Platinum titles are in love with two things: parries/i-frame-dodges, and combos. I explained here why I kind of loathe the former and think they're kind of killing modern action games, but Platinum Titles take it to an absolute extreme where using your one-button defensive action is not only an answer to everything, but it's enthusiastically encouraged to be the way you lead every single situation and everything in the games are more or less built around using them as much as possible.

In dmc on the other hand, not only do you have a more elegant and straight forward scoring system and deeper movesets, but its design encourages aggression and creativity over passivity and call-response countering. Royal Guard was strong, dodge rolling was useful, trickster too, etc. but by using your mobility and offensive repertoire to cleverly shut down enemy attacks, you could keep the pace up while staying on the offense (and be just as rewarded by the style ranking). Forcing a weapon clash with Cerberus's spinning approach, attacking and approaching while low profiling or high profiling attacks with the trick up/down teleports, i-framing through big attacks while simultaneously doing big damage via Ice Age (mind the recovery and start up though!), launching yourself into the air and hovering over barrages with gunslinger combos, etc. etc. your moveset was not only a more varied toybox to play with but could be used more creatively for both offense and defense with multiple valid and rewarding options possible in each situation, and continuously keeping the aggression up while scoring well with adaptation, improvisation, and technique made for a wild ride. Nothing else like it.

I wouldn't want to force a one-size-fits-all design philosophy into every action game on the market. A game is not automatically worse because it uses a certain mechanic, it's how it's used that matters. Bayonetta's Dodge Offset is a wonderful tool that keeps you on the offensive side and justifies the use of the invincibility on dodge mechanic as BareKnuckleRoo pointed out on that thread you linked to. He also mentioned several ways in which you can hitstun enemies without the use of Witch Time. You should have read that wall of text.


This a better description of Ninja Gaiden 2's survival missions than anything on DMC3. If you are trying to position it as the best game of its genre, as you seem to be doing, you can't shrug off the criticism of its enemy design so easily. God Hand, Ninja Gaiden and Bayonetta all do a better job on this regard, even DMC1 does this.

Yeah, I tend to agree nowadays. Despite Bayonetta's comprehensive ingame movelist and the physical manual both mentioning it, Dodge Offset is strictly a reward for players who bother to take the time to actually read the documents. But a lot of people who've picked up the digital release don't bother with the manual, and tons of people never seem to actually see or read Dodge Offset under the Special Techniques list. It's a darn shame so many people have played it without learning or realizing there's a technique that completely elevates the combat. I used to think it was nice having a game that didn't hold your hand and have an explicit tutorial for EVERYTHING, but honestly I'd rather they did just so that there's no excuse for new players to miss out on Dodge Offset. It's just that fun to play with.

Bayo's really not that hard by DMC standards; it's meant to be more of a stylish, fun, action experience, a power fantasy rather than a super hardcore game with much stricter dodge mechanics like God Hand or Ninja Gaiden. You really have a frankly insane moveset that lets you tear enemies up when you know what you're doing, especially when you consider that your best attacks are ranged attacks and don't require getting up in an enemy's face.

Oh I'm not. However, to me its a very interesting case because I sincerely think over-reliance on parry/i-frame-dodge mechanics are kind of actively ruining a lot of action games, perhaps the genre as a whole, and it's interesting to go back and take a look at one of the earliest case studies that began to really popularize Platinum's call and response design philosophy.

Bayonetta itself is a good game. There's a lot to appreciate about it. I like its accessibility, its presentation and energy, its polish, its incorporation of platforming and other gimmicks that connect the various battles (obviously not a new thing but the polish and smoothness of it is arguably superior to a lot of equivalent sections in earlier games), and that it overall does a better job of encouraging you to play it well by breaking down each aspect of your ranking post-battle. It's much better thought out and executed than many, many of the derivatives that followed it (including those from its own developer). It's definitely not my style (its two mechanical focuses, witch time and dodge-offset, basaically are aimed at my least favorite aspects of this genre...I already talked about my criticism of dodge/parry mechanics, but while dodge-offset is cool it must be said that combos are actually my least favorite part of action games and fighting games in general), but I can appreciate it.

But still like I said it's interesting to look at it in the context of where the genre (and Platinum) ultimately went.



Not everyone has time for multiple walls of text between other people!

Oh I know there are ways to hitstun enemies outside of it, just like I know there are ways to play stages aggressively while getting Pure Platinum's. I talked with a guy who put 1000+ hours into Pure Platinum'ing everything on Non Stop Climax, and it pretty much confirmed that "Yes, there are ways to play aggressively via intense game knowledge and clever routing, but 90% of the time you're going to be playing defensively. The game wants you to play passive while your learning and aggression and tricks are more for the highest level of mastery and rely on esoteric routing and combo gimmicks".



I was more talking about DMC general, though I would maintain 3 is the best of the series even if 5 is probably an answer to many of your complaints.. That being said I don't know what criticism there is to shrug off ("I don't find the enemies fun" isn't really a detailed criticism to respond to in any depth and I already explained why I find them more fun than Bayonetta's mooks anyway).

I'm not sure I'd call it the best character-action game, though it's definitely up there (and it's more relevant a comparison than Ninja Gaiden since dmc and bayonetta share a direct lineage of staff, with the latter being heralded as a spiritual successor at release, not to mention all the control and moveset parallels). But it is an example of how a game with all-powerful defensive mechanics doesn't have to become enslaved to them, and while I don't advocate everyone should copy it to the t, I do hope future action games learn to do the same in their own ways

IMO it's RPG mechanics that are ruining action games. I want to enjoy those Ys games you love so much, but they would probably never sell as standalone time attack games. I do agree with you in that I find it disappointing that Platinum has done little to evolve the genre, but I'm honestly just glad they're still around and not dead like Clover, if only because of Kamiya.

I personally don't relate with your or that guy's experience of Bayonetta. Sure, I don't have 1000+ hours in the game, but I've managed to Platinum (not Pure Platinum, but it honestly doesn't look that difficult) a few chapters with their corresponding Alfheims/Secret Verses and without checkpoint restarts or Pulley's Butterfly. I did equip Gaze of Despair for these runs, which can make the game harder or easier to score well in depending of your opinion, since it gives you more combo points but also increases the enemy rank. These last two things I did inspired by Iconoclast's Pure Platinum run which shows that you can play the game in a much more efficient way, Ninja Gaiden style if you like, without those fancy combos you despise so much. I don't and can't play it that way, but I feel the challenge of trying to learn high level Bayonetta is much more satisfying to me than doing the same in DMC games.

While forced RPG elements are frequently banal (though they do serve genuine purposes in some games. As I explained before Ys Oath/Origin genuinely use them well as an impetus to avoid skipping enemies while leaving maze exploration fully free and open), I generally find them even at their worst far easier to ignore or work around then core mechanical elements and design. You could strip all the rpg elements out of Ys 7 and 8, or pile on even more, but either way it will never fix the parry issue which makes every single boss play the same, and the combat would never be as good as Oath/Origin.



To be sure, even though I factor Platinum these days under "meme shit that's over-rated by normies" (much like, say, Studio Trigger) I don't hate them and still enjoy quite a few of their works as among my favorite games (as opposed to Studio Trigger, which is actually garbage).



I think one reason for this is that while dmc is more fun to play in general and at a deeper level, Bayonetta had the sense to immediately rank and grade you on everything and after each battle (as opposed to only at the end of stages). I think the style grading system in dmc is a vastly superior scoring system, but the way Bayonetta seperately grades you for damage taken, time, and combos after each battle was a genius way to make the game more compelling and rewarding even with worse (IMO) combat. There's an immediate compulsion to it, an impetus to do better and get graded better with each and every combat sequence. DMC on the other hand kind of expects you to keep your own running tally on how you're doing until the end.

Also tbf I don't "despise" combos, I just prefer when fundamentals like mobility, spacing, offense / defense balancing, take center stage over combos...since combos (when you get down to it) are basically just a rhythm game. That and I prefer an immediately accessible moveset with more strategic use then Platinum's style of gating most of your moveset behind attack strings. But this is more of a personal preference.

I forgot to say, my runs were played on Infinite Climax. It's pretty late for me, I'm going to sleep I don't have much to add, though. Have a nice day, Squire!

You too! Goodnight!