Mostly came here for the mame questions, but my god, Necro please post what you are doing with Shadow Tower on your youtube channel. After all this time I'm *finally* getting good with bloodborne, as in Ludwig, Abhorrent beast, etc. are becoming first try / easy kills. Loved Ancient City but don't 'get' what's going on with Shadow Tower (I assume you mean the ps2 Abyss title.)
Randorama wrote:ban CMoon for being a closet Jerry Falwell cockmonster/Ann Coulter fan, Nijska a bronie (ack! The horror!), and Ed Oscuro being unable to post 100-word arguments without writing 3-pages posts.
Eugenics: you know it's right!
Anyone who has played Shadow Tower through in English has probably been amused by the "Ring of Dark Souls." It turns out this coincidental future name drop was only present in the translated version of the game: The Japanese name for this item was ソウルクラッシュ (Soul Crush).
However, I was looking over some of the information that I have been compiling on this game and noticed that there is an enemy in the final area of Death World named ブラッドボーン. These are red skeleton minions of the final boss of that area and were translated to English as "Blood Bones" but it stood out to me because it's the exact same katakana that would become the Japanese title of ブラッドボーン (Bloodborne).
So, if you play the English version of Shadow Tower you get a fun coincidental name drop for Dark Souls, and if you play the Japanese version you get the same for Bloodborne!
Well, I say coincidental because Shadow Tower was released in 1998. I imagine neither Dark Souls nor Bloodborne were even an inkling in anyone’s mind back then!
How dare you question this latest piece of revealed wisdom left to us in the pages of nerd history by our lord and saviour Miyazaki.
It was all prophesied in the past how he would SAVE gaming
..and cast out the false god Yagawa.
Necronopticous wrote:Well, I say coincidental because Shadow Tower was released in 1998. I imagine neither Dark Souls nor Bloodborne were even an inkling in anyone’s mind back then!
I'm thinking more simple around the lines of Naotoshi or Miyazaki really digged the name of "ブラッドボーン" in Shadow Tower, so they intentionally reused it as a nod to that.
Ed Oscuro wrote:I'm glad to hear it's even better than the sequel.
I'm not quite sure I would say that it is the better game. There are some real problems with the first Shadow Tower. It is a strange and fascinating thing, though. Abyss is an improvement in almost every technical way, but it just didn't have the same impact on me as a holistic experience. I think I'm probably in the minority opinion on this, even among the minority of us who even have opinions on this shit.
Having only played Ancient City, is there any particular stand out from the rest of the King's Field oeuvre? To be honest, all these games mean battling with a control scheme I hate, but on the other hand Ancient City has an incredible soundtrack!
Not to subvert this into a Sekiro hype-train, but my recent runs of bloodborne have definitely put me at ease regarding a game with only minimal customization and progression. Bloodborne was its most broken in the main game where you could be over leveled and its most refined in the chalice dungeons where leveling almost didn't matter. I'm really excited Sekiro might actually force players to have that ah-ha moment like in Bloodborne where suddenly you're beating Ludwig without taking a hit. Well, we'll see.
Randorama wrote:ban CMoon for being a closet Jerry Falwell cockmonster/Ann Coulter fan, Nijska a bronie (ack! The horror!), and Ed Oscuro being unable to post 100-word arguments without writing 3-pages posts.
Eugenics: you know it's right!
Sekiro is gonna be some intense shit. I generally don't buy CE/LE etc anymore but I hope there is a steelbook of Sekiro, I'd buy it. Plus it would look nice next to Bloodborne and Souls Trilogy steelbooks.
Necronopticous wrote:A new question has entered my brain and I can't seem to get it out: can I beat Shadow Tower without ever using any consumable items?
Was thinking about it too. Is it because of unavoidable damage (since you can't regain any, and are stuck with the starting amount), or you simply don't have enough weapons to do it?
The challenge is getting through the Poisonous Cavern. The normal strategy here is using a poison vaccine which lasts just long enough to run through the poisoned floor section while taking out the Hanging Dead enemies. Without consumables the only way to survive here would be to use either passive HP regeneration or HP drain on equipment. Unfortunately there is not a single piece of gear that has HP regen available before the section of Poisonous Cavern in question. There is one item that you can get as a rare drop from an Imp in Rotting Cavern (Ring of Poison) which provides HP drain but I tested it out and it’s so low that it’s not enough to be useful for healing through the poison damage. You could definitely do a no healing potion run, though.
CMoon wrote:To be honest, all these games mean battling with a control scheme I hate
Do you have a PS3 or Vita?
Yes, I have a PS3. Does the ps3 version of shadow tower have a better control scheme?
Randorama wrote:ban CMoon for being a closet Jerry Falwell cockmonster/Ann Coulter fan, Nijska a bronie (ack! The horror!), and Ed Oscuro being unable to post 100-word arguments without writing 3-pages posts.
Eugenics: you know it's right!
Ah, so it pulls a posion/damage floor like the King's Field games. Can those stationary enemies in the Human World, that inflict damage just by being near them, be killed wiithout taking damage (don't know their name)?
@CMoon: I think you can rebind the controls in those platforms, enabling the use of the stick(s) for moving/looking around.
CMoon wrote:Does the ps3 version of shadow tower have a better control scheme?
Yes, you can remap the controls so that it plays like a modern twin-stick FPS. I did this for Shadow Tower on my Vita (practically necessary there since the L2/R2 "touch pads" are worse than useless) and it is absolutely wonderful. Highly recommend! Plus, Shadow Tower is like $5 on PSN.
I should have had it this time, honestly. I was being pointlessly greedy with my HP in the Watery Labyrinth Area and paid the price. Anyway, good run overall. I will get it next time!
Finished off the original King's Field (J) earlier today. It was thrilling from start to finish, and I've been really impressed with how fully-fledged its dungeon design is. I was expecting it to be in some ways rudimentary or half-conceived, full of good ideas struggling to be born, but this wasn't the case at all. The second and fourth floors in particular are as smart as anything in a modern Souls game, and have a similar structure, sending you exploring their catacombs in a wide arc and slowly unraveling their puzzles before you discover - a stone's throw from where you started - the path to the next area. It's full of great worldbuilding detail, too, like the sketchy, incomplete maps you come across, missing lots of minor and major pathways because their dead cartographers didn't find them. I'm struck also by how much the game does visually, given its limitations - it presents an astonishingly beautiful and peerlessly stylised world, and it's a bit saddening that the response is so often this unexamined boring consensus opinion that it has "aged horribly", or that it looked awful even at the time, etc. (It does look very of its time, of course, but it's not as if the game's vision simply wasn't achieved due to technical limitations - it pulls off what it sets out to do very effectively, establishing a deeply expressive style with confidence and finesse.)
It's become one of my favourite games, the series having been on my radar for ages without previously getting its hooks into me (besides listening to their soundtracks a lot), and I'm excited about devouring the rest of the series, many of which I'm already unwisely haemorrhaging money on. I'm particularly excited to dive deeper into KF2, which so far seems to be an even more ingenious and powerfully atmospheric game, with the kind of neatly interlocking, labyrinthine area design I can't get enough of. I wish I'd had it 20 years ago. What a series!
Klatrymadon wrote: it presents an astonishingly beautiful and peerlessly stylised world
It's certainly charming and cool looking but i wouldn't go that far!
I'm ready to be convinced otherwise though..
Thought I would finish my level 1 run of D0rk Souls today but Manus is giving me too much trouble. I get him down to a slither of health then get hit by his spell mix-up.
It's a touch of death for me.
Played through Echo Night 2 this weekend. Not sure how I rank it up to the first one. Certainly longer, with the first I think taking me 5-6 hours and this one right at 9, with a few restarts since I was playing on the old 1.0 translation patch that has some crashes when trying to access items in your inventory instead of the quick access.
This one takes place mainly in a mansion and some neighboring buildings, so it's pretty familiar territory with haunted fare. The first definitely gets more points in originality for setting it on a cruise ship. Some pretty melancholic ghostly encounters. The whole thing, like the first, really feels like a bummer. Giving all these poor fucks some solace feels good I guess, but it's still just a damn lonely, moody series.
Some decent puzzles, like filling in some music notes, and then some annoying ones, like putting on lab coats and presenting specific items to specific people to proceed. The thing that really bummed me out though is that it's easy as hell to get the bad ending in this, and once you get to a certain point you're just fucked without knowing it. There's a handful of these little bastards playing hide and seek, and once you find them you free their souls. To get the good ending you've got to free everyone, which is fine and easy to do, but you're not made aware that to find these kids requires both an item that you inevitably lose and cannot get back (lantern), and an item that is finite and not necessary to use (candles). The thing with candles is there's empty holders to play them all throughout the game, but you only find a few. It's never made clear that they're necessary for anything, other than warding off a malevolent ghost temporarily until you manage to get the power back on. Once you place a candle you can't remove it after it's lit, so yeah, it's either a second playthrough or read about it beforehand if you want the good ending.
Looking forward to revisiting Beyond, because in the past I was too much of a wuss to tackle it. Now it's been a good chunk of years and I'm completely heartless and have no fear.
BIL wrote:
"Small sack, LOTS OF CUM" - Nikola Tesla
Klatrymadon wrote:I'm excited about devouring the rest of the series, many of which I'm already unwisely haemorrhaging money on.
Yeah...this sounds familiar. You are in for a treat, man! Be sure to post a whole lot as you go through the other games so we can all re-experience them vicariously through you. Speaking of which...where's jepjepjep?
Nice work man! When I finally beat Manus at SL1 I told myself I was Finally Finished With Dark Souls, but then I went and did this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrEwXxBzFc0
Now I'm Finally Finished With Dark Souls.
Maybe.
drauch wrote:Looking forward to revisiting Beyond, because in the past I was too much of a wuss to tackle it. Now it's been a good chunk of years and I'm completely heartless and have no fear.
I still haven't done Beyond. It's certainly on the list, but I may just watch the longplay like I did with Echo Night 2. Let me know how it goes!
Kuon is next for me, I'm just trying to find the right time/mood. Also I guess I will need to stop playing Shadow Tower for 2 seconds.
Necronopticous wrote:
Yeah...this sounds familiar. You are in for a treat, man! Be sure to post a whole lot as you go through the other games so we can all re-experience them vicariously through you.
Hehe, sure, will do! I'm playing most of their other first-person games on and off, too, so I'll try not to waffle too much. Particularly enjoying both Shadow Towers at the moment. I love how the first one uses darkness and quiet (love the lack of a constant soundtrack) to heighten the tension.
I'm not sure I could convince anyone of KF1's beauty, Blinge - I just have a huge appreciation for its forlorn-looking gouraud shaded NPCs, the unexpected expressiveness of the low-poly enemies (and the otherworldly textures they're often skinned with), the increasingly bizarre and garish palette choices for the walls and architecture as you go deeper into the cemetery, etc. I was just delighted by the whole package.
I'm struggling with Gwyn at SL1 now.. can't bloody do it.
I'm thinking of running a normal VIT heavy character up to him just to practice parrying his moveset.
Edit: what, he's weaker to fire than lightning? what?!