What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Immryr]

Of course I have finished it. Many times. And no, there isn't any kind of cool down between using the healing items, you can pop three of four in a row and just tank through hits. Yes you can farm healing grass in demons souls, they hadn't come up with the estus system yet so it's forgivable. Having said all this, other than the infinite healing items, dark souls two is the hardest game in the series in terms of combat situations.

Once you play dark souls 1 you will realise how much the limited healing you get from your estus flask adds to the tension and excitement of exploring. Running out of estus when you have come quite far from the previous bonfire and having to decide if you want to push on and risk dying or return to the last bonfire just to have to fight your way back to where you are now is pretty much the essence of dark souls.

[Squire Grooktook]

From what I, as a Souls noob, gather is that your build greatly influences the difficulty. Some people absurdly claim that this makes those games "unbalanced" when it is in fact completely logical that different builds should excel at different tasks in a game that throws vastly different challenges at you.

This is correct. Your feelings on bosses are probably going to vary widely compared to others based on your build.

That being said, there are a few legitimate imbalances. For example, magery in dark souls 1 and demon's souls essentially turns the game into easy mode. And that's not really a good thing because if you want to actually have some fun boss fights as a wizard, you're out of luck.

Ironically, Bloodborne and I think Dark Souls 3 (not familiar with the meta) took this a little too far the other way, with magic really difficult and a little too situational.

[Kiken]

Battle Zeque Den (SFC)
Basically, "I have the high ground." The VideoGame. This is a rather awkward unification of a beat-em-up and a platformer which can't quite make up it's mind what it wants to be. Enemies have excessive health (even zako require 2 or 3 full combos to kill), and despite the simplistic 2 vs 1 nature of the game (that's right, no more than 2 enemies on screen against a single player at any time), it's really easy to get boxed in and wrecked by foes standing over you after a knockdown and performing frame-perfect strikes against anything you try to do on wake-up (oh, and even the zako can decimate your life bar in a couple of hits). The block function is more like the counter system in DOA (you can't simply hold down block forever... your character just takes a defensive stance for a second and then drops their guard). So beautifully designed....

And the game doesn't even occupy the entire screen. The playfield is essentially in letterboxed wide screen (there are significant black bars at the top and bottom of the screen).

[BIL]

I gave Battle Zeque Den a shot years ago, came away feeling pretty much the same. Didn't play very far before quitting. AFAIK, X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse is a vastly more successful hybrid of platforming and brawling, and good fun in its own right regardless.

[Chaos Phoenixma]

Been playing the Basement Collection.

So far,

100% Meat Boy (but haven't played far into the level pack yet). Game is definitely nice, though going from Super Meat Boy to this definitely throws a bit off.

Cleared Coil. Was meh, but it's short.

Beat Grey Matter on Normal/Boss/Expert Modes. This isn't difficult once you know how the chain and upgrade system works.

Beat Spewer's maingame and am now working on Chapter X (currently at Pillow Fort, which is supposed to be one of the harder if not hardest level in it)

Time Fcuk is so good, but I'm terrible at puzzles, so I haven't gotten far into it. Used my 2 skips though then realized I probably should have saved them for later, so I restarted it. Enter the Unknown on it though is crap, there's apparently no level verification, so people mention that you can run into literally impossible levels which forces you to use one of the 2 skips that you're allowed, and you can't skip the last level or it doesn't count. I've tried Enter the Unknown a few times and have gotten ridiculous troll levels several times that pretty much warranted a skip including one that was possible if you got it the first try, but it cheap shots you pretty much at the start and if that happens it glitches out to be impossible.


Didn't play much of Aether or Triachnid yet, will probably need to look up walkthroughs for those ones.

[atheistgod1999]

I calmed down about earlier; realized that yeah, I should just balance things. Went back to retro gaming after about a day. Turns out that spending too much time on here was the main culprit of my emotional/anger issues, so I'll just not post here as often and instead make some actual friends in clubs at school once they start.

Anyway, I'm playing the original Half-Life. I like it so far (in the freezer room as of typing), but it's pretty damn easy and I'm playing on the hardest difficulty. Was playing some CS:GO earlier, but it's just not that fun when I don't know anyone I'm playing with/against.

And by the way, for Xyga, NTSC-J, Lord Satori, and the others who PM'd me advice: I actually did read it and tried to follow it the best I could (which wasn't very well). I thought you would be bothered if I replied.

[Sumez]

From what I, as a Souls noob, gather is that your build greatly influences the difficulty.

Sure. Or even just different playstyle. I finished the first two Souls games before even realising how big a thing backstabbingwas, never doing it outside the tutorial.

Still. I'm just curious to hear what the "mid point difficulty spike" was. Must be a specific set of areas or bosses in mind?

[Immryr]

played a bit of yakuza 5 today, i have to say i was not expecting the game to turn into takushi de go!

[wgogh]

Now I'm playing X Men vs Street Fighter in MAME and the Hokuto no Ken fighting game for the ps2.

That is Mamiya or Kenshiro in HNK and Rogue with Wolverine in XMvSF. I need to look for a command or something to get to training mode in X Men. Still have to train some of the moves. For now, I can use the second player for that, but it dies too quickly.

[Squire Grooktook]

X-Men Vs Street Fighter is nice. The slight delay on dashes tends to throw me off a bit, but it did help to balance speedy guys like Wolverine. On the other hand, this is the game that introduced triangle jumping with Magneto/Storm, and they dominate really hard with it.

For training mode, I just used some cheats to disable timer and give unlimited health to player 2.

[Some-Mist]

I could say in my experience DS2 is the hardest, but purely based on the fact that I accidentally missed the hub town in the beginning of the game and went in the wrong direction ._.

I don't really remember having that difficult of a time after I located it (hours into my playthrough), but I don't think anything was really memorable from my playthrough.

[Mischief Maker]

I just finished Hyper Light Drifter and the ending...

Spoiler

I don't think it was poor writing, I'm just sick to death of bad endings in video games.

It's not the same as writing in a book or movie, a video game's story is something the player poured effort into, learning new skills, only to get a "yeah, fuck you, this is art" for all their hard work.

It's maddening, especially at the end of super long RPGs.

There are a few exceptions that EARNED their downer endings.

But it was still a fun game and I'm gonna play through the harder New Game+ mode before I'm done with it.

[professor ganson]

Has anyone spent time with the new Shiren on Vita? I was playing it for a bit and it seems like a really solid game, but it's not a genre I know that well. I've only played a handful of roguelikes and they were either too easy (Pokemon) or too harsh on beginners like me (most of the titles I've tried). This Shiren seemed to be in the latter camp.

[evil_ash_xero]

Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
Game is pretty great, but the length of the stages is really making me hesitant to play it. I really need a lot of time.
I'm exactly half way through, and there was a BIG twist. My jaw dropped.

Dark Souls II: SotFS.
I don't really like this game much, but I have to beat it. It's a matter of honor.
I'm finishing up two of the last DLCs. The bosses are slowing me down. Yowza. Fume Knight!!!!

[Durandal]

I should note that everything I've said about DOOM up until now has been based off watching streams, and now I finally got to play the game through magical means. The end result? Something surprsingly not shit, albeit a massive toll on my patience, mind, bandwidth, and HDD space. I don't have the time or patience to talk about the SnapMap and multiplayer crap because nobody else cares about those either:

Spoiler

Unfortunately, each reboot seems to suffer from modern storytelling-itis. You're some dude in Halo armor ripping and tearing demons, why do I have to listen to Dr. Ultron going on about how justified he is in siphoning energy from Hell for the sake of the Earth? Why do I have to see spirit echos of UAC personal dying violently? Why is there a lore notification for every little new thing popping up in my HUD? Why, despite Doom Marine punching the screen at the start of the game indicating our general distaste with this kind of storytelling, do we still have to suffer through sections of Story Sections where we stand around and do nothing until someone is done talking? Sure, it's short, but it shouldn't even be in the game in the first place. All of this reeks of having a bunch of writers on the team who had absolutely nothing better to do and next to no creative impulses because DOOM simply isn't a story-focused game by design. But everyone is okay with this now because we have been conditioned to tolerate this shit.

The story elements would have been much more bearable if this game wasn't so serious. For example, you'll constantly see holograms of corporate spokepersons talking about the possibilities of siphoning energy from HELL in order to use it for the sake of the Earth, now what could possibly go wrong? In a more silly game like No One Lives Forever you'd think 'Of course that's bound to go wrong, silly!'. Here in DOOM it's rather a case of 'Are these people fucking retarded?', because the tone of DOOM implies it takes place in a world identical to ours, except it has demons. Any sane person would think twice about screwing with HELL, or using demons from hell to create cybernetic soldiers. It might've been funny if the atmosphere, tone, music, and art style didn't ooze SUPER SERIOUS SCI-FI SHOOTER. It would've made more sense if we saw the perspective of the employee's, except we don't. Even Serious Sam was less serious than DOOM. The Codex lore entries suffer from the same problem, with paragraphs and paragraphs of black corporate humor in a game not entirely suitable for it. But at the same time we have these mini-Doomguy figurines as collectibles which seem rather out of place.

We end up having to follow the orders of some Samuel Hayden, essentially Dr. Ultron who did nothing wrong and is just trying to save the Earth with free energy. Thankfully going against Hayden's orders is somewhat entertaining, but that's about the only interesting part of the love-hate relation we're supposed to have with this dude. And then he shows up at the end to steal our magic sword and leave us in prison as we are completely pwoerless to do anything about it. SEE YOU IN DOOM 2: DOOM HARDER, GREASEBALL. Aside from that we spend half of our free time chasing some woman named Olivia Pierce who's responsible for triggering Hell, and is absolutely uninteresting by herself. She made a deal with Hell for some reason, and then gets backstabbed at the very end. No shit. The second person to yap in our ears is some AI named VEGA who sounds like the AI in the Iron Man movies, and is also trying to compete for The Least Interesting Character in DOOM Awards. For some reason we save a backup of him after setting him to self-destruct, because that's something a murderous madman like the Doom Marine would do and because lol sequelbait. I wouldn't have to complain about this shit if it didn't shove its shit down my throat. Where's the walls of text of Romero doing his best Dungeon Master impression?

The level design in this game takes a rather entirely different approach to the original. The pacing is split up into circular monster arenas interspersed by platforms to jump on as enemies teleport in at random, which are interconnected by long hallways and open areas which on paper would make for decent Doom levels, but the designers decided to instead place the bare minimum amount of enemies in those hallways for you to not fall entirely asleep. Instead of tightly designed enemy encounters and level layouts, here the level design process seemed to be 'design a circular arena and have enemies spawn in waves' while the rest is whatever the plot mandates. It doesn't help the levels in DOOM stand out from eachother, that's for sure. Those monster arenas have all kinds of Multiple Vertical Layers™ just like in those Quake maps, however the combat still largely takes place on one axis with minor height variations (much like the original), rather than the use of verticality in the original Quake (when Ogres were placed by hand in higher places).

In the end the verticality is there to just move around and feel like you're a Quake 3 pro. There's no reason to look up and down in combat, as there are no enemies which make use of the vertical layers. Flying enemies like Cacodemons or Revenants do not attempt to flank you from above or beneath, they just hover enough from the ground to stand out, but not too much so as to not be a burden to players using controllers. While enemies can climb and leap in order to get to your position, it only feels as if they're trying to catch up to you. You'll face a variety of enemies at once and will be switching weapons all the time, to even further enhance that Q3 feeling. It's only a bloody shame that the first 50-75% of the game takes place in more simplistic environments whereas the last few arenas could pass as small Unreal Tournament maps with the amount of carnage that's going on, but then the game ends. There's probably several factors which prompted this change in direction:

1) The level designers simply didn't know how to really do it as none of them (seem to have) had any experience in designing 90's era FPS levels, using only recent 'retro' shooters (Painkiller, Serious Sam, Hard Reset) as an example.
2) Compared to Doom, the amount of enemies is smaller and their average HP is higher, meaning there's less enemies to place around to begin with lest you end up with massive walls of bulletsponges.
3) Compared to Doom, the enemies here tend to move around faster, as levels in Doom made up for the slow movement speed of the enemies with large amounts of varied groups of enemies placed by hand in all kinds of placed to keep the challenge in place. So level layout will matter less as enemy speed and movement increases, since cover will play less of a role if the enemy can just catch up to you at any time, unless you and the enemy have the same abilities (e.g. multiplayer). You tell me which direction works best.
4) DOOM's cast of enemies doesn't particularly encourage the player to use the layout for sake of defense. There's no hitscan enemies forcing overaggressive players to reconsider, and the speed of all projectiles in DOOM is so fast that projectiles effectively blanketing large areas and limiting the player's routes barely ever happens when sidestepping lets you dodge them just fine. Compare this to Marathon Phoenix on Total Carnage where in larger areas fighting hordes of enemies it's basically like facing a huge amount of streaming bullets in a SHMUP, where crossing the stream is the hardest part as you'll inevitably face a wall on the other side of the stream. In DOOM the projectiles are so fast that a stream of projectiles doesn't even have a chance to form.
5) Consoles.

There doesn't seem to be anything which makes you reconsider the direction you're moving on, unlike say, hitscan enemies, bulletsponge walls or just WALLS. The large open nature of the levels and amount of objects you can jump on make movement a case of 'whatever'. On one of the last maps I just repeatedly ran the same route thanks to the presence of portals, weakening the amount of enemies with each loop until everything was dead. Other levels were mostly a case of riding around on a skateboard with a shotgun. That's pretty much what the developers intended based on an interview, but something should also threaten to break up your skateboard ride, otherwise you end up with a repetitive and/or easy game. Ideally no game should have a guaranteed winning tactic (without proper risk or punishment) when there's no incentive for me to do otherwise, because it tends to make all the other unrelated mechanics in the game feel pointless.

There's nothing wrong with this approach in level design per se, you just need a good cast of enemies to make use of these arenas. Which DOOM doesn't really do (or could have done better). For starters there are The Possessed, groups of screaming cannon fodder which do nothing other than serve as easy health piñatas when you're at low health, as they can be easily glory killed after just one melee strike. The Imps appear to flank you and move around intelligently, but in reality they are just moving around randomly much like how you will be playing this game, during multiple occassions I had Imps just running past me rather than attacking me from the side. The shield guys and Pinkies appear to pose an interesting threat by being impervious to damage from the front, but you can easily down them with a rocket fired at a slightly deviant angle. There's Hell Razers, whose ability to fire straight lasers also seems interesting, but instead of firing their lasers AT you they just swing them around slowly and randomly. Hell Knights and Barons of Hell ARE interesting because of their ability to leap around in the air and screw you over, but they don't do it enough to pose a huge threat, and at the same time you might inevitably get caught by the shockwaves if you were trying to play aggressively, which makes me wish for a higher movement speed.
Cacodemons just fly around and fire projectiles which temporarily obscure your screen, a feature which could be capitalized on, but wasn't.
Revenants are more or less upgraded Imps with jetpacks who fire flashy-looking missiles which are just as easily dodged as your regular fireballs. Unfortuantely their ability to fire homing missiles is gone, which would have surely spiced up combat by facing the player with an immediate threat. Summoners teleport around and spawn enemies, but what they spawn (Imps, Possessed) isn't all that threatening, and Summoners tend to be more of an annoyance than anything. Lost Souls behave more or less the same like they did in Doom, but like the Summoners, they barely appear in the game aside from a handful of encounters. Mancubi could probably be the most threatening enemy if the level designers placed them in positions where they could effectively limit your movement, but as it stands you pretty much circlestrafe around them until they die. Only after finishing the game and consulting the wiki did I find out there was a variant of the Mancubus which was more dangerous than the basic version and could fire pools of acid which COULD limit your movement, but again made moot by the circular level design allowing you to just walk around it with little trouble. IMO I think a more skilled level designer could combine these enemy types to form more interesting combat encounters, but alas.

Devil Daggers is an arena FPS which takes place on a flat arena, but managed to be tense and interesting because of: enemies being able to catch up to you, crowd control being essential as enemies are constantly spawning around you, and some enemies posing a bigger looming threat than others who need to be prioritized. In DOOM, you can outrun most of the enemies just fine, meaning crowd control isn't that big of a deal as killing enemies isn't that hard, and no enemies pose an immediate threat. If a game with a flat layout can create more interesting situations than your game with supercool arena maps, you probably need to redesign your enemies.

Then, outside the monster arenas, I am treated to long stretches of DEAD TIME: absolutely easy-to-deal-with enemy groups, contextual action animations, platforming sections, plot shit, keyhunting, more walking around, and so on. It's not just the forced plot sections which pause the game's flow, but the entire structure of the game itself. Doom barely had any dead time, the action was constant and the only breaks you ever got were the level clear screens and/or secret/keyhunting. In DOOM, the more enjoyable parts of killing things now have massive dead time between each other, either to pad out the game length or because the level designers couldn't design any meaningful combat encounters outside circular arenas. Overall, the combat made me feel like playing another one of those mindless shooters like Painkiller or Fallout 4, the sections where I wasn't shooting things further reduced my mind to a near-vegetative state. Let's have the player rip and tear by walking down these awesome empty corridors? If you want to have a rollercoaster ride of suspenseful rising anticipation and wild drops, then make at least sure that the build-up is still engaging in some way like FEAR's tense horror sequences, Unreal's atmosphere, or Marathon's interesting terminals rather than boring hallways which don't encourage me to enter a state of hyper-awareness.

Situational awareness is another thing DOOM failed to learn from Doom or any FPS worth its salt, and basically what requires one to pay attention the game, because otherwise you're dead meat. Situational awareness comes in the form of sound amongst other things: enemies should make sound which alerts you to their positions, their attacks should make sounds (other than the sound which plays when you get hit) so you can respond in time, and you should be able to grasp the situation just by playing blind. See: Devil Daggers. In DOOM, whatever sounds aren't overlapped by the noisy-ass music and the infinite screaming of The Possessed, barely give you a good indication of what's happening around you. I know there's demons, but whatever positional sound is present is barely helping me at all. I remember dodging shots in Descent from fucking behind just because I heard them coming from behind, and I wasn't even sure whether the sourceport I played it on had positional sound. Even if you were to react to the sound of upcoming projectiles in Doom, they're so fucking fast that moving in any direction any time is the surefire method to evading projectiles anyways. Slower bullets gradually blanketing the playing field Marathon Phoenix-style would've been more interesting.
There's no enemy priority considering there's no enemy type which you must URGENTLY dispose of in DOOM, like say Zombie Shotgunneers, so there's less reason to pay attention to your surroundings. There's deadly enemies like the Barons of Hell and Mancubi, sure, but you'll be alright as long as you keep circlestrafing and the levels tend to be large enough in size that you can worry about them later anyways.

The weapon balance takes a more Quake-ish approach, meaning the rocket launcher and super shotty is what you'll be using most of the time. Everything else is just icing on the cake. The weapons also take after Quake in another way, which is the presence of normal weapons and their super variants. There's no super plasma rifles, but the Gauss Rifle may as well be one. Once you get your hands on the super weapons, you'll be using those weapons most of the time because ammo management is a joke anyways. So the normal weapons end up being useless in comparison, BUT thankfully there's two alternative fire modes which expands the flexibility of each weapon in combat, except most of these alternative fire modes mimick the stronger weapons in one way or another. All of these alt. fire modes rely on cooldowns before they can be fired again, and IMO cooldowns are just band-aid design most of the time. Let me alternatively fire whenever I want at the expense of more ammo, damnit. It's not like time is of the essence in DOOM. Nearly every alt. fire mode has a slight delay between being cooled down and ready to fire, but nearly every alt. fire mode has an upgrade which reduces that delay, which begs the question why you'd bother intentionally increasing that delay just for the sake of being able to upgrade it.

Your starting pistol is drek. It belongs in Halo and its bullet casings make no sound. OG Doom was built with pistol starts in mind (according to Petersen) and it shared the same ammo pool with the superior chaingun, so its place in the arsenal was justified. Here in DOOM it's just another one of those weapons for when you completely run out of ammo, which NEVER happens. It's got a crappy charge function which I never really used anyways.
Next up you get your good ol' shotgun, which is also drek. It's effective range is absolutely pathetic and can only one-shot Imps when you're right in their face. General purpose weapon this ain't. One alt. fire mode of the shotgun has it resemble the rocket launcher by firing an explosive projectile, and the other resembles the super shotty, except it fires three shells at once rather than two, and it has a cooldown on top. Why you'd ever use the shotgun after obtaining the SS/RL is beyond me, but you'll be stuck using it for the first half of the game.

After that there's the Heavy Assault Rifle which is fairly effective at dealing with low-tier demons at any range. It can be turned into a pseudo-sniper with the scope (if you want to play in a way completely antithetical to the design of the game), or slap some Micro Missiles on it, which again begs the question of 'why shouldn't I use the rocket launcher instead?' (Until you get the RL, anyways).
The plasma rifle feels like a water gun, it just doesn't have the same sound effect of the original which felt like you had thunder in your hands. It's primary fire is more or less the same as the HAR, except it fires slightly slower plasma projectiles in comparison to the HAR's bullets. Quite frankly, I don't see much reason why you would ever use the primary fire aside from curiosity. One alt. fire charges up the more you fire the primary fire only to unleash a powerful blast (why would you be using the primary fire on the Plasma Rifle anyways?), and the actually useful Stun Bomb which stuns nearly everything. I only ever used the Plasma Rifle for the sake of the stun bomb, though even then I barely used the Stun Bomb because I never had a real need for it. Killing demons instead of stunning them worked just fine. Most of the time after combat encounters I remembered that I said to myself that I would use the Stun Bomb, but that time rarely ever arose.

Now we get to tackle the heavy weapons: the Super Shotgun blows enemies away and so does it blow away the regular shotgun. This is a game where the double-barreled shotgun has a higher effective range than the normal shotgun, in contrast to gaming conventions where the regular shotgun would be more useful for its tighter, more accurate spreads compared to the SS and its destructive close-range potential. And as a result the shotgun feels useless, but there's the SS at least. It's double ammo consumption doesn't really matter anyways.
The Rocket Launcher feels much weaker than it should, due in part because of the enemies' increased health pools. In Quake, the RL was the go-to weapon as it had the highest DPS and rocket ammo drops were fairly frequent. However, the claustrophobic nature of the level design and the rushing nature of the enemies meant that the RL was not viable at close-ranges due splash damage. DOOM's level design isn't claustrophobic in the slightest, so you won't have much problems using it whenever, once you upgrade your ammo. Which I think is a mistake, as it makes other weapons feels less useful in comparison. It's useful against one-shotting weaker demons, it's useful against taking down heavier enemies, and clearing some space between you and your enemy is fairly easy, while splash damage is negligible due to Glory Kills periodically refilling your health and an upgrade which reduces self-damage. And again, ammo isn't a problem thanks to the chainsaw and fairly frequent ammo placement. The remote detonation basically doubles your DPS when fully upgraded and wrecks everything, while the lock-on burst I barely used because I want to SHOOT things.
Aside from that we have the cool-looking Gauss Cannon which replaces the Plasma Rifle with a beam which one-shots weaker demons from any range. Goodbye, Plasma Rifle! One alt. fire mode turns the Gauss Cannon into a super sniper (goodbye, HAR with scope!), and the other Siege Mode is what makes this gun so OP OP OP. With Siege Mode, you have to charge a shot by standing still completely which then fires a shot which one-shots nearly everything. But someone with common sense will realize that (double)jumping before charging will largely mitigate the charge time and not make you completely vulnerable, but on top of that a Siege Mode shot consumes the same amount of ammo as a regular shot. Honestly, the risk for charging a Siege Mode shot is pretty much negligible if you have any idea what you are doing.

Now, you might think that of course you'd be using normal-tier weapons on normal-tier enemies to save ammo, but the developers failed to include AMMO MANAGEMENT in the weapon balance equation. In Serious Sam, you had the Tommygun which was a straight-forward bullet hitscan weapon, and the minigun which dealt more DPS at the cost of higher ammo consumption. But because they shared the same ammo pool, you'd be using the minigun most of the time because it killed things faster, and the Tommygun felt pointless as a result. Now, what Croteam did in SS3 is to actually seperate the Tommygun (now an AR) from the minigun in terms of role in the arsenal. The AR got a seperate ammo pool from the minigun, and was meant to kill cannon fodder from any range thanks to the zoom function it had, while the minigun, superior in DPS, was meant for more serious encounters rather than every encounter. Players came to realize this difference as minigun ammo didn't grow on fucking trees.
The frequency of ammo drops/placement can do a lot to affect weapon balance, and a lot of issues with DOOM's weapon balance could have been partially solved if ammo in DOOM wasn't near-universal thanks to chainsaws and ammo boxes dropping ammo of every type. But instead we end up with an arsenal where everyone is guaranteed to gravitate towards the SS/RL combo and leave everything else in the dust aside from the Gauss Cannon. The BFG now just acts as a handheld nuke which I barely ever used because I'm not Polygon, and even then there's way too many charges on the floor for an insta-win weapon like the BFG.

This is largely because of the chainsaw, and the crazy idea of someone thinking that chainsaw kills should refill a large part of your ammo, with the additional benefit of instantly killing anything as long as you have enough fuel. And later on the chainsaw pretty much guarantees you will never run out of ammo (provided you upgraded your ammo cap), as combat encounters rarely last long enough to the point where you will be using the chainsaw to refill your ammo multiple times on top of rather forgiving ammo placement in the levels, and there's usually enough chainsaw fuel in the DEAD TIME sections to compensate. You won't go with full ammo into every encounter, but you'll always have more than enough for most weapons. FEAR also did something similar with being able to carry 10 portable medkits which you could use at any time, except there were no pick-ups which refilled your health (aside from secret permanent health upgrades), and playing badly would result in a lot of damage, and thus using a lot of medkits. Spending too many medkits would also encourage players to rethink their playstyle on the long term, because medkits aren't everywhere in FEAR, and going in with barely any medkits means you are less likely to take risks. DOOM isn't a game where you think in the long term, you shoot and move and the game takes care of the rest. That doesn't mean the lack of long term-thinking is inherently bad, but you need to create a multitude of varied and interesting challenges in the short term like action games such as DMC and Bayonetta if you wish to compensate for it. And variety is not DOOM's strength.

One thing worth praising DOOM for is that it did bosses in first-person shooters (more) right by simply copying Ratchet & Clank and/or Ys instead of falling into the pits of hitscan bulletsponges, helicopters and puzzle bosses. It's really that easy! And so are the bosses! Namely, you get a free full health refill once you get a boss down to 50% HP, on top of a massive ammo refill as well. The bosses are not bullshit, but could've been more tightly redesigned. The bosses attack with projectiles and well telegraphed attacks, though evading most attacks by themselves is quite easy. Second is the classic issue of how a weapon arsenal designed for encounters against multiple enemies at once is supposed to work against one big guy. As usual, you will be using the most powerful weapons (Rocket Launcher, Gauss Cannon w/ Siege Mode) against the bosses. Because bosses refill your ammo halfway through, ammo won't be much of a problem. It's just a shame that DPS is the only thing that matters for boss fights. Another shame is that there are only three boss fights in the entire game, all of them confined to the second half. I'd love to see more bosses in FPS games like this, if the difficulty was cranked up some more. The Cyberdemon fight is fairly simple, and has some interesting attacks here and there (I swear that this corridor attack and the wave pattern are copied straight from Ys Origin). But a large part of the fight is just shooting at it until it dies. The Hell Guard is a bit more interesting as it is invincible until it attacks, but in the second phase where you have to fight two Hell Guards at once they no longer have the shields, and as a result you'll be 'mashing' attack more than anything, which is kind of a shame. The Spider Mastermind boss has some neat tricks up its sleeve too, but isn't really fitting for a final boss fight. It's just one big demon who absorbs Olivia, that one person nobody cared about, and then the game ends. (For GOD's sake, a song like this doesn't fit a FINAL boss fight at all.)
I like the bosses because they can't be won by just circlestrafing (mostly), unlike the rest of the combat encounters. If there were more attacks and projectiles in regular combat encounters like the Cyberdemon's tracking laser beam, corridor attack and wave beams at varying height levels, the Hell Guard's invincibility and ground spinning attack, and the Spiderdemon's 'the floor is lava' attack, then the regular combat encounters would have been much more interesting.

I forgot to mention the equipment system, which is just another layer of fake depth which I never used. You basically get a bunch of throwables which recharge over time. First you get a frag grenade, which isn't all that effective considering it bounces around and never really explodes where you want it to, rather than it detonating on impact. It's just redundant in a world of rocket launchers and flak cannon shotguns. There's also siphon grenades which I guess leech health, and holograms which distract demons? I honestly don't know, because I really never used anything other than the frag grenade, and even then I rarely ever used frags. Redundancy is a keyword here.

For some reason, id thought that having the player pause the game in order to access a multitude of upgrade menus would contribute greatly to the depth and progression of the game. It does neither, it's another one of those upgrade system where the upgrades are a matter of 'when' once you cut out the useless options. The upgrade system for a game like DOOM is just needlessly convoluted and could have easily done with some streamlining. First you obtain the weapon mods from flying drones, where you can choose one mod for any of your weapons which have two potential mods. Then you obtain upgrade points by a) killing as many demons as possible, b) completing challenges which are unique for each level, and c) finding secrets. You use these points to upgrade the alternate fire modes of your weapons, rather than the primary fire. Each time you upgrade a weapon mod, the next upgrade choices will increase in price. Once you have all three upgrades, you can perform a challenge unique to the weapon mod in order to unlock the final upgrade for that mod. Why all the weapon upgrades just won't upgrade this way, I don't know. Then we have Praetor tokens, which you find on the bodies of dead Elite guards scattered around the levels, each level has about five of them. These tokens are used to upgrade your suits' enviromental resistance, automap system, equipment system, or dexterity. These upgrade trees are more linear in nature, however. For some reason the later trees are locked until you get more weapons, which is probably to prevent players from instantly going with the OBVIOUSLY MORE USEFUL DEXTERITY TREE WITH THE WEAPON SWAP SPEED AND LEDGE GRAB SPEED UPGRADES. Then you can upgrade your suit's maximum health, armor, and ammo cap with Argent cells, which are sometimes placed on your main path or sometimes in secret areas. Because your ammo cap starts off as pathetically limited (you start off with a maximum of twenty shotgun shells), the ammo upgrades are an obvious choice, whereas health upgrades don't matter that much thanks to Glory Kills, meaning upgrading your maximum armor is somehow more reasonable. And then we have runes, additional perks which can be obtained by completing mini-challenges scattered around the game world hidden behind portals to hell. These runes grant various passive bonuses like speeding up Glory Kills, increasing the Glory Kill range, dropping armor on Glory Kills, and so on. You can carry three of them max, but you need to have at least a handful before you can equip two and another handful to equip three, for some reason. Then these perks can be upgraded to a Pro version by completing the challenges unique to each rune, which grants you an upgraded version of their effects.

Did you catch that, camera guy?

What was meant to be a system to let players choose the way how they want to play instead ends up adding nothing. The majority of weapon upgrades are efficiency-related like reducing ammo cost, penetrative shots, less wind-up time and so on, rather than being unique sidegrades for existing mods. Of COURSE I want faster reload speed on my super shotgun, but why do I have to choose to upgrade something I'm guaranteed going to grab in the first place? An upgrade system based around essential upgrades for any playstyle detracts from the idea of player choice, again begging the question of 'why bother'. Unreal had an entire arsenal of weapons with alternative firing modes and didn't need upgrades other than for the starting pistol. Duke Nukem 3D didn't need any upgrades. Doom didn't need any upgrades. Serious Sam didn't need any upgrades. Marathon didn't need any upgrades. What does DOOM do that warrants four upgrade systems? It's not like DMC where the upgrade system exists to prevent the player of being overwhelmed by all the moves available in the game, and then have the player first learn the basic moves while periodically learning the new ones after buying them.

And finally, we have the Glory Kill system, because nothing screams MODERN GAME DESIGN more than constantly rewarding the player for the most inane shit. Basically once an enemy is on low health, he enters a stagger state where does nothing but glow like a disco light (the lights can be turned off in the options), as you're supposed to finish him off by moving in and performing a cinematic takedown, which then grants you bonus health and random ammo drops depending on the current state of your health. This is supposed to encourage aggressive and close-up play, in order to prevent the player playing the game like your usual modern shooter. The animations themselves are not that much of a hindrance as they usually play out fast enough and you are invincible while doing so, but this still leaves you open to enemies waiting behind you or temporarily having no idea what's going on around you because of the first-person perspective solely focusing on the poor sod you're about to execute, on top of the FoV being lowered in order to not make the executions look glitched if you were playing on a higher FoV. This system leaves with a few questions:
Number one, where's my health drops when I one-shot an enemy from close range with the super shotgun or rocket launcher? Wouldn't I be playing just like the developers wanted me to in that case? Then where's my reward? If I don't want to risk losing potential health drops, why should I have to reduce my attacking power by selecting a weaker weapon? Isn't that paradoxical to the designers' intentions by not playing TOO aggressively so you can get your rewards? The game already has enemies automatically drop health on a non-Glory Kill death when you are on low health on top of enemies sometimes randomly dropping on any kind of death, can the game get anymore forgiving with health management?
Number two, why not ditch the need to execute cinematic takedowns for health and instead implement a proximity-based reward system where you get more health depending on how close you were to the enemy when you killed him? The Glory Kill animations do not hinder the gameplay too much, but at the same time they don't really add anything other than looking cool for promo footage. So why not do away with the pointless animations entirely and keep the flow free from hindrances? It's not like there's much risk involved in standing still for one second while invincible.
Number three, why not shave off the minimum health from all demons where a demon enters a stagger state, go with a proximity-based reward system instead, and increase enemy numbers for the sake of more ripping and tearing? Isn't shooting at more enemies at once more fun? At least it would be, if all of them wouldn't be such massive bulletsponges.
Number four, where's the risk in enemies automatically dropping emergency health with or without being Glory Killed when you're on low health? You just have to play like you usually do (without getting hit as much) and eventually enough health will be dropped to heal you back into a fighting state. This way the game pretty much takes care of your health for you, as long as you keep killing and Glory Killing. You won't rely on placed medkits that much, which saves the level designers the trouble of having to consider if placing a medkit in this place is a good idea!
Number five, are Glory Kills necessary to encourage aggressive play? Aren't there other methods like scoring (I know modern gamers consider scores something only turbonerds care about) or power-ups which disappear on hit? On one hand you have an incredibly forgiving system where anyone can play aggressively, and in the other you can immediately tell the bad from the good players. I doubt I would change my playstyle whether Glory Kills are present or not, because I do not want to cheese out all the enemies from long range. I guess that depends on your skill level.

You'll gain enough health to stay in the fight long enough, but you'll rarely ever be at maximum health outside of health upgrades, health stations, and Mega Health pick-ups, which made me wonder why I ever bothered upgrading my health. It was useful against bosses, at least, but in hindsight I would've upgraded armor as being able to carry more armor into a fight is guaranteed to let me live longer when health manages to stay on a stable level most of the time. The DEAD TIME segments more or less serve to have you Glory Kill everything for health and look for secrets, rather than seemingly integrating combat and exploration like Doom did.

Whereas I talked in my previous rant about Wolfenstein: TNO how modern games tend to lack aggressive playstyles and skill ceilings, DOOM goes a bit too far in letting the player play aggressively, to the point of being a power fantasy. Power fantasies in games should be earned, not handed to you on a silver platter, which is most evident in the Hell voice logs which detail how much of a badass dude the Doom Marine is. Being able to play aggressively all the time either means you are really good, or the game is just too easy. As this was my first playthrough, I'd consider it a mix of both. Sort of like rollercoasters, there needs to be a wind-up to the high points. Winning is more satisfying after you lost many times or had to put a tremendous amount of effort into the win. With nothing to push you back into defense, the kick behind steamrolling everything starts to wear off. The skill ceiling in DOOM is easily reached, with no way to tell whether I performed better last time or this time, unless you are playing with self-imposed rules. Id wanted to encourage aggressive play, but went too far in doing so, forgetting that aggressive play should naturally arise from mastering the game's mechanics, rather than make the game so easy and forgiving that there's rarely any reason to play defensively in the first place.

Playing this game lulled my mind in a state of 'huuuuuuuuuummmmhuhuruhuhuurrrrmhuuu' where violence goes in and out. I have no idea what exactly happened most of the time. I just moved around in any direction, shot shotguns at nearby small demons and/or rocket launchers at big demons while glory killing every time the disco lights show up. There was no particular nuance or idea to my movement, circlestrafing anywhere while grabbing ledges is good enough to play effectively. I don't really know when or how I lost my health, nor how I gained it. While initially I had little ammo because of the ridiculously small ammo cap which any sane person should upgrade, later I don't really have to worry about ammo because of the abundant ammo drops and the chainsaw gladly refilling my ammo supply while instantly killing the poor sod happening to stand in front of me. I can't hear what's going on around me because demons or their projectiles make no unique sounds (whatever isn't covered up by Transformers noises playing in the background). It's as if the game automatically takes care of all that shit for me while I can focus on moving and killing things. It's as if the only thing that matters is moving in any direction and shooting things with whatever weapon you see fit.

If I had to describe DOOM, it's like playing Painkiller with the enemy cast of Doom with less enemies and more health, the weapon balance something resembling Quake and Serious Sam, the setting, artstyle, and tone of a violent sci-fi Hollywood movie, the sound and music of the Bayformers movies, the level pacing of any modern shooter, and the story of a bored team of writers who had absolutely nothing better to do. The focus of DOOM seems all over the place. They want you to rip and tear, and then throw you through long sections of nothing. Doom Marine's behavior implies disregard for modern storytelling conventions in favor of action, only to lock you into those same modern storytelling conventions where everything is super serious and no fun is allowed. The mini Doomguy figurines, black corporate humor, and Doom Marine's violent tendencies imply DOOM was supposed to be a more light-hearted game which didn't take itself so seriously, but all of that falls flat on its face because of the overbearing serious tone of the game which makes those elements fit in rather badly. Your efficiency in combat and flow is weighed down by the many upgrade menus you must pause to peruse in order to make use of your full arsenal. The game wants you to take risks and attack aggressively, while any sort of risk is mitigated by the Glory Kill system dropping more health depending on your current amount of health. For a game which wants you to rip and tear, what it actually does is oddly contradictory.

Even though I consider Painkiller the standard of mediocrity for these kind of arena/old-school games, I would've ranked DOOM higher than Painkiller because of more varied movement, usage of enemies and cooler boss fights, yet DOOM tries its absolute best to bore you with long stretches of nothing, a boring generic sci-fi artstyle, boring story, boring enemy encounters, and more shit which contradicts the ripping and tearing this game wants you to do. DOOM is a 'mindless shooter' on par with Painkiller, Fallout 4, and the Call of Duties. Perhaps it's only mindless to me because I've played many old-school shooters before and saw what they had to offer, so if you are relatively inexperienced with FPS games, this might serve as some kind of crash course on do's and don'ts. If you think that the original Doom is a mindless shooter, then I urge you to play OG Doom on Ultra-Violence and reconsider. DOOM is an average game which is good if you need to shut your brain off. Try looking for anything else in DOOM and you'll only end up finding something forgettable.

[iconoclast]

Furi

Platinum'd this. I thought it was decent, but I didn't like it that much. Nothing really stood out as being good or bad, it's just a short and simple boss rush game. It reminded me of Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae since it's in the same low budget/poverty game tier, except I probably had more fun with MKH. But it's a good PS+ freebie, especially since I'd never download most of the stuff they put up.

Actually, I should say that the story mode is awful. You have to slowly walk from boss to boss while the narrator gives you some backstory about each one. I never payed attention to anything he said since I'd just press the X button (which auto-walks your character to the next boss) and browse the internet for 5 minutes before they'd let me play the game again. Thankfully there's a speedrun mode that cuts all of that junk out, but I still had to play through the story a few times to get the S-rank trophies and some other miscellaneous ones.

[Squire Grooktook]

The cutscenes are great. Script is short and snappy and really gives that atmospheric Radiant Silvergun feel. I think you did yourself a disservice by not listening to them tbh. Especially since you seem to enjoy awful jrpg plots like Persona ^_^, nah I kid, but seriously if you think Tokyo Mirage is anything but awful, you got nothin' to lose here

Game isn't perfect, but it stood out to me as one of the few games of its kind (only thing that feels similar to me being the Sora/Suguri series, and maybe Senko no Ronde, but both are quite different). It's main problem is how scripted and choreographed many elements of the fights are: You're gonna parry when the game wants you to parry, and nothing else you can do at that point is allowed to be effective until you parry first. It pretty much is a modern Treasure title, in that regard (and in both presentation and gameplay it wears that influence on its sleeve). If it was a little more organic in boss design with more freedom to improvise and risk/reward balance for doing so, I think it would be straight up sublime. As it is, I think it's just "excellent" and most of my criticisms of it are tempered by the fact that there's no true competitor on the market.

The "zippy" melee attacks and the spacing when you're free to choose between both gunning and sashing at mid-range are the most characterful aspects of it and the most entertaining IMO.

Overall it's probably one of my goty's, but I can understand that others might not be feeling it.

Putting MKH above it though is just a travesty, and I'm a part of the minority who thinks that game is actually not terrible.

[Volteccer_Jack]

Game is pretty great, but the length of the stages is really making me hesitant to play it. I really need a lot of time.

In case you didn't know, mid-battle saves in FE4 are permanent saves, not the 'quicksaves' the rest of the series uses. I found it helpful to divide each chapter into 2-4 sittings. Just gotta be careful not to lock yourself into a bad spot that way (leaving castles unguarded for example).

[Squire Grooktook]

Revisiting Advance Wars a few months ago after the Fire Emblem spree really cemented my opinion that FE is the true "arcade srpg".

Advance Wars is wonderful and deep, don't get me wrong. But its single player campaign continues to feel more like a puzzle game to me (not that there's anything wrong with that, wonderfully designed and clever puzzles that they are), where the key is to analyze the map and use the "right" strategy...otherwise you'll eventually bleed to death in an endless battle of attrition as the enemy slowly encroaches.

FE's maps have strategy to them too, generally featuring a right and wrong way to take them on, but it's much more loose due to the randomness. It's a vicious, lethal game where a restart can come at any moment off of one poorly calculated movement. Live fast, die fast, think on the fly...and with relative streamlined simplicity, it's the srpg series that most makes me feel right at home when I go from playing a shmup to navigating its battlefields.

[wgogh]

X-Men Vs Street Fighter is nice. The slight delay on dashes tends to throw me off a bit, but it did help to balance speedy guys like Wolverine. On the other hand, this is the game that introduced triangle jumping with Magneto/Storm, and they dominate really hard with it.

For training mode, I just used some cheats to disable timer and give unlimited health to player 2.

I beat the game two times by know.
Got the Cyclops ending first, in which he tells Ryu that "humans and mutants should live together. We may see each other again, and untill that day the X Men will keepblablablablabla"
The Rogue's ending is funnier. She aks Chun Li "How it is to be normal, sugah?" and she replies "I can throw fireballs. What's normal about that?"

[atheistgod1999]

Pac-Man on my obscure handheld known as the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition graphing calculator, whenever I'm in math class. I impressed the other kids in my assigned group (one of whom showed the rest of us calculator gaming) by getting to level 8 and a score of 27190 (wrote it down) on my first try, while the rest can only get up to around level 3. I played it a few times before, and I thought it was pretty accurate (never looked up the ghost behaviors, BTW).

One of the kids has a TI-83 Plus, which has more games available, including fucking DOOM and Double Dragon. I need to get him to download those games.

NOTE: I figure out all the answers we're supposed to solve as a group in about 2 minutes, so I'm not gonna fail the class or anything (and I'm in AP math already, so I don't really have any reason to go above and beyond anyway).

[null1024]

Street Fighter 5[PC].
Got bodied by my friends, playing on a buddy's machine. Would be nice if I had anything myself that could run it.
Decided to pick up Guile, I really like him in this game.

Pac-Man on my obscure handheld known as the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition graphing calculator, whenever I'm in math class. I impressed the other kids in my assigned group (one of whom showed the rest of us calculator gaming) by getting to level 8 and a score of 27190 (wrote it down) on my first try, while the rest can only get up to around level 3. I played it a few times before, and I thought it was pretty accurate (never looked up the ghost behaviors, BTW).

One of the kids has a TI-83 Plus, which has more games available, including fucking DOOM and Double Dragon. I need to get him to download those games.

Man, I wished I had a data cable back when I was in HS. All the calculator games I had to play [can't even remember the model], were BASIC type-ins. Would have been great to get some ASM games, TI-BASIC shit is so fucking slow and jank.

[system11]

55 hours now in Project Diva Future Tone, it's brilliant.

[null1024]

55 hours now in Project Diva Future Tone, it's brilliant.

I kind of want a PS4 almost entirely for this.

[rapoon]

Hyper Light Drifter

Even though it's a completely different genre, I'd say this game delivers more on the promise of No Man's Sky than the actual game did. An aesthetically sumptuous game of exploring a world heavily inspired by the art of pulp science fiction.

The combat's not too shabby, either.

I heard mixed things about HLD - mostly regarding the framerate and (IIRC) the finicky nature of the dash; I was really interested when all the trailers were coming out though.

The framerate is indeed capped at 30fps, but that's not really a problem because despite your ninja-like agility the combat is actually pretty slow and deliberate compared to, say, Ys.

As far as the dash, first of all I'd strongly suggest playing this game with an analog gamepad to avoid any problems with the dash. If you insist on Mouse-WASD controls, they default to dashing toward the mouse pointer which is extremely awkward, but there's an option in the gameplay settings to tie dash direction to the movement keys and that solves the problem.

HLD got a patch a few days ago. It's now 60 fps. It's a godsend for NG+ (your health goes from 5 blocks to 2). Dashing is more consistent.

Playing 'Mother Russia Bleeds' and h a c k m u d

[Blinge]

Kingdom Hearts

..meh.

[soprano1]

Kingdom Hearts

..meh.

If you think it's meh, don't bother with the second, it's shit, only the gameplay is better than the first.

[Blinge]

I see. well better gameplay sounds good to me.

Should've played this stuff as a kid, really.

[soprano1]

I see. well better gameplay sounds good to me.

Should've played this stuff as a kid, really.

The story is really shit in the second, mind you:

Spoiler

Sora becomes near gay for Riku, Goofy becomes the party's smart guy, and Donald becomes the exact opposite of what he acted like in the first. The villains look like something out of a BL doujin...

[evil_ash_xero]

Game is pretty great, but the length of the stages is really making me hesitant to play it. I really need a lot of time.

In case you didn't know, mid-battle saves in FE4 are permanent saves, not the 'quicksaves' the rest of the series uses. I found it helpful to divide each chapter into 2-4 sittings. Just gotta be careful not to lock yourself into a bad spot that way (leaving castles unguarded for example).

Yeah, I do know that. But I get kind of fixated on beating the stage. It's a personal problem.