Media Videogame Thread

One hell of a week for fighting games thus far.

2 major balance patches. Both for arcsys games. One actually good, the other complete and unfettered dogshit.

Guilty gear's patch for the new DLC introduction is a massive step forward. Nerfs to the tournament winners, potenyahu in the fucking dirt again (thank god) some buffs to characters that needed it and some buffs to characters that didn't (HC is perfectly balanced). Can't really comment on it a ton since I'm not super into guilty gear anymore but the community says it's one of the best patches ever so I'm inclined to take their word for it.

Meanwhile Under night... WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING.

New character looks cool. She's literally just platinum from blazblue but more aggressive which i guess is in line with how UNI plays? but that's where the good ends.

There are zero nerfs in this patch. Which would be fair since none of the characters are super overtuned. However.
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To the untrained eye, this looks like a very minor buff. Do not be fooled.

Phonon's 236 is now a full screen normal. Phonon can ALWAYS have a tool to combo start from ANYWHERE on the map.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1957623906610635099

And this is just one of the buffs. (Hey, at least ogre is good now ahhahhahahahahahaahaha FUCK)

https://twitter.com/x/status/1957779346858324380
gahahahahaha hilda gets more movement! yes she definitely needed that!!!

and guess what? hyde still gets to just mash a for hit connects and get a free 0-50 out of thin air! yuzu is still unapproachable even though she has no combos! linne still has 15 unfuzzyable mixups from round start! but noooo we need to buff every charaacter in the game not even for balance! just for the funsies! because we can! and a rehashed blazblue character is DEFINITELY going to shatter the meta in half so we need to give every character a full screen hit confirm so that doesnt happen! ahafhdhfsdkjafklasjdfhasdfhadsfhlc fucksdkvjasfpojhvcjkdsvn
 
Any Elden Ring players here? If so, what builds do you run? Been trying to experiment a bit recently (mostly due to Nightreign) and trying to break out of the Jump Attack Strength cycle but not really had much success; the best i've found is to simply drop one of the Giant-Crushers and put Lion's Claw on instead of Cragblade. I've tried Raptor Talons and thought they were cool but the damage didn't really impress me enough to warrant use over a bigger weapon (along with the poor AOW section), Sword-Lance was OK but the damage was just simply half of the Crusher and I gave up, and I tried mixed Sorcery/Carian Sovereignty and Bolt of Gransax but didn't really like either. First playthrough was with dual Katanas but neither was status-oriented (Moonveil and Meteoric).

I think the main thing I have is an allergy to weapons like Straight Swords or Spears, whose base damage I once described to a friend as "piddly" (i'd like to be proven wrong but have not had success thus far), so any tips would be cool.
 
Oh hey UNI mentioned. Me, CryoGyro, and GatoDelFuego tried to learn it a few months ago but got busy, maybe we'll make time again in the future. I'm new to fighting games and terrible at under night and haven't played the new patch yet, but I'm still gonna shitpost.

1. Wasn't Hilda like a low tier LOL

2. Okay, so Phonon gets a hitconfirm from full-screen ASSUMING she has meter and lands a Frame 18-21 low that can't hit the air. Honestly, considering the crazy shit that can happen in UNI...yeahhhhh that's probably fine

3.
RainWaiv said:
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Oh no! Anyways,

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Mr. Uncompetitive said:
Oh hey UNI mentioned. Me, CryoGyro, and GatoDelFuego tried to learn it a few months ago but got busy, maybe we'll make time again in the future. I'm new to fighting games and terrible at under night and haven't played the new patch yet, but I'm still gonna shitpost.

1. Wasn't Hilda like a low tier LOL

2. Okay, so Phonon gets a hitconfirm from full-screen ASSUMING she has meter and lands a Frame 18-21 low that can't hit the air. Honestly, considering the crazy shit that can happen in UNI...yeahhhhh that's probably fine

3.


Oh no! Anyways,

View attachment 767616
Click to expand...
1. yeah but shes annoying

2. only specials inputted with the C button cost meter, 236a/b are meterless. thats why i like frenchbread games so much is they force you to actually use specials in a lot more situations than you would in something like blazblue/guilty gear so you're forced to learn motion inputs.

3. kuon has shit blockstrings he can have a little extra range as a treat (i'm glad they figured out how to kinda balance the floater characters lol *cough f-hime cough*)
 
Got a question to ask. I'm planning to get the Switch 2 and I'm planning to get Mario Kart World or Donkey kong Bananza.

But I'm curious, how are the games to those that have played them? Did you enjoy them and have a blast?

I might tell my experience with Metroid Prime Remastered and Fire Emblem Three Houses later.
 
It's been a minute since I've posted here as most of my game time has actually been spent playing pokemon lol But I'm back with another game review and this one is very interesting.

Dragons Dogma: Dark Arisen

Overall Ranking: A+

The Good: Dragons Dogma is an action rpg developed by Capcom of all people and was originally released on PS3 and Xbox 360. Dark Arisen is a DLC that released, and the game was later ported to PS4/XBone with the DLC built in, hence the name. It features a very nice dark fantasy art style that I think is very lacking in the gaming scene, very reminiscent of things like Dungeons and Dragons I'd say. The combat mechanics are incredibly fun, with a number of vocations and playstyles to choose from. It's a game that highly rewards understanding of the game mechanics, and feels very rewarding to play. The large enemies in the game dwarf you by a lot and really feel fun to fight against. Hard mode also offers a really balanced challenge having enemies scale with you, meaning you can kill them fast but they can do the same back. One of the main gameplay features of this game is creating your "pawn." Pawns in this game act as npc companions to help you out with quests. You can customize and equip them the same as you would yourself, and set them up to fight in certain ways. Then you can access the servers via an area in game and recruit up to two other pawns from other players to help you fight. You can even gift other people's pawns things like special items and armor and they'll receive it in their game, which is something I experienced myself so people do in fact still play. The story presents itself as a basic "chosen hero" story but ultimately it has some twists and is incredibly interesting.

The Bad: Man oh man oh man. It's hard for me to want to critique this because there is so much I love, but there is unfortunately one glaring flaw with this game that is impossible to ignore. At the time of the game's conception in 2008, games like Dark Souls, systems similar to the pawn system, and an open world Capcom game just didn't exist. Due to this, Capcom executives forced developers to cut around 60% of the game to keep it cheaper to develop and to take less of a risk on it. This is noticeable in a lot of aspects, primarily when it comes to side quests, side characters, and even the main story. You will play it and always have a sense that there is something missing or just not quite there. Concepts are developed but the knot is never fully tied. I think it's easy to look past as someone who likes having a sense of wonder in my games, especially since the core gameplay mechanics are so fun but it always left me wishing for and wondering about what could have been.

Final Thoughts: This game has been recommended to me in the past and I'm glad I finally got around to playing and beating it. I'd highly recommend playing it sooner rather than later as I'm unsure of how long they plan to keep the servers up, and playing with other people's characters is so fun. Highly recommend playing alongside a friend or something. Played through with my little brother and it was so fun sharing stories of each other's characters. I know a Dragons Dogma 2 exists but I don't know much about it but I've only heard bad things. Can't speak much on it. If anyone made it through my slog of a post and has any recommendations as to what I should play next let me know!​
 
Krockodile said:
Got a question to ask. I'm planning to get the Switch 2 and I'm planning to get Mario Kart World or Donkey kong Bananza.

But I'm curious, how are the games to those that have played them? Did you enjoy them and have a blast?

I might tell my experience with Metroid Prime Remastered and Fire Emblem Three Houses later.
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I enjoyed both of them quite a but but its hard for me to recommend them not knowing your tastes in gaming. Do you like kart racers? Do you like collectathon type games? If so, you’ll have fun with both games.
 
Me, Cryo, and Gato have been playing Silksong and are past Greymoor. We might force ourselves to play more, but we're heavily tempted to drop it.

Is the game bad? Ehhh, not really? Is the game unfun? Absolutely.

Aesthetics do nothing for me, spritework really doesn't feel novel in the year 2025, soundtrack is "beautiful" which translates in my head to "boring sounds I'll never listen to outside of the game", and the VFX sure feeling like Unity assets and often get in the way of your ability to play the game properly. Didn't care about the story and lore but I'm not gonna hold that against the game. The movement game feel is pretty fun! At least, as you get more upgrades. Shame there's an absurd amount of delay on your dash jump, making it really awkward to use, so it still certainly isn't the best I've experienced in a 2D game.

Our problems with the game are...numerous and varied, but they can all really be summed up in two larger points:

1. This game is a bad way to do game difficulty. This game is mostly hard because you die in 3-5 hits, you are severely lacking in I-Frames upon getting hit, and enemies take FOREVERRRRR to kill. The gameplay incentivizes you to play slowly and patiently, and by god, does it test your patience. This is a game where you're supposed to have lots of movement options, and yet, because of the endlag involved with some of these options, their distance doesn't always feel quite correct enough, and because of how the attacks in this game are designed, you're often heavily discouraged from playing fast and loose, with bosses like Greymoor and Deep Docks Lace becoming significantly easier once I stopped dashing (read: the bosses became easier once I decided to stop having fun). Additionally, due to how slim the margins for error are, the actual difficulty of individual parts of the game can't be that crazy, because it still needs to be something "digestable" for the player (enemy attacks can't fill the screen with crazy stuff you have to dodge, because you die in three hits). I died to Greymoor a fair number of times, but it was less because the boss was insanely difficult, and moreso because I was getting impatient, and I was getting impatient because the boss is mindnumbingly repetitive and BORING (this shit did NOT need to go on for like 3+ minutes) with attacks that can mostly be dodged by just managing your distance (read: CAMPING), and the second you decide to do something different, you get punished incredibly hard, and, because this game gives you barely any health, you die for it. Not to mention this game is just filled with lots of "gotchas", be it traps you can barely see coming, hazards and random enemies that deal 2-3 damage, new boss attacks, you can't really sight read, etc. And again, the issue is that you die so easily in this game that cheap traps like that feel all the more annoying, I legitimately feel like I'm playing I Wanna Be The Guy at times.

Also, why are there enemy gauntlets? You think I really wanna spend several minutes getting past some bulky ass enemies with repetitive attack patterns?

2. This game is a bad Metroidvania. The Metroidvania aspects honestly just serve to make the game worse. The map needs to be bought and, even then, it's useless until you get some upgrades like the compass (also, Chakra disappearing when you've already "explored most of the map" is one of the dumbest mechanics I've ever seen; you think I know this area all that well just because I've been walking aimlessly for the last half hour???). This means you have to wander around each area hoping you figure out where to go; I can't imagine how much worse this game would get if I wasn't playing it with two Metroid experts by my side. The levels and screens feel incredibly samey, and without a map it takes me a bit to figure out if it's a place I've already been to. And even if you do feel like exploring...why bother? Most of what you'll find in side rooms are just rosaries and lore stuff. When you die in MetroidVanias, you should feel incentivized to go exploring to find some upgrades and then retackle your challenges. In this game, because you need to reclaim all your rosaries when you die, you're heavily disincentivized from exploring because you need to go recover them, you often don't have a map to keep track of where you should go, and god knows you'll be able to survive whatever bullshit the game wants to throw your way if you decide to try another area (assuming that area even has anything of value!!) so like...might as well just keep throwing your head against the wall and keep doing the same area, especially if your rosaries can only be recovered by spawning a boss or enemy gauntlet.

This game feels like it's a Metroidvania for no real reason. It's a 2D Soulslike, and not a particularly fun one.

It's a game we were pretty exhausted with every time we finished a session. We'll see if we can finish it. Let us know how you guys are faring.
 
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Mr. Uncompetitive said:
Not to mention this game is just filled with lots of "gotchas", be it traps you can barely see coming, hazards and random enemies that deal 2-3 damage, new boss attacks, you can't really sight read, etc. And again, the issue is that you die so easily in this game that cheap traps like that feel all the more annoying, I legitimately feel like I'm playing I Wanna Be The Guy at times.
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The 'high difficultly' of these sorts of games just leads to a question in game design. Why is high difficulty desired? There's lots of reasons for designers, but the common one would be satisfaction upon overcoming the challenge. I don't really feel like I'm enjoying any aspect of that with this game. I have played many difficult styles of games

- glass cannon style protagonists with a combat focus. Hotline Miami. Katana Zero. You press a button to instantly respawn and you're back in the action. When enemies do half my life in 1 attack in this game, I'm disincentivized from experimenting with combat because the penalties are high. If I die, I've got retraces to do. The game is pushing me toward hit-and-run, slow, campy gameplay, which I don't find fun
- Boss gauntlet combat games. Furi. Cuphead. The bosses are all very intricate and have a lot going on, as they're the main focus. In HK the bosses have 2 or 3 moves. I've heard the bosses get described as 'the reward' for HK and that may be true later on but it feels too boring to start...even lace in silksong which felt like a classic 'swordsman vs swordsman' fight just relegated itself to run away and peck in a swipe when you can. The giant robot in the lava area was the most boring fight I've played (2 tries). Moorwing was not much better (4 tries).
- Platforming hell. Super Meat Boy. I'm squarely focused on tight level design with again no downtime and no combat to get in the way.
- Classic 'metroidvanias' (don't find many that hard). Guacamelee. Mummy Demastered. Dust. Dead Cells. Just for a couple examples. Rich world with tons of either movement abilities or combat weapons with plentiful exploration to 'level up' the characters. I'm 5 hours into silksong and have been exploring generously. I've got a dash and a glide movement skill, but no health upgrades? No way to deal more damage? Why would I go back and explore any further areas (not that I have any way to break open walls a la super missile, if such a thing does exist). What hidden areas am I going to get exposed to? I'm not having fun killing generic enemies. My character moveset doesn't feel anywhere close to complete but all the stuff I see online only reinforces I'm supposed to get used to the basic sword attack....
- Classic 'souls like' action games. But also Hack and Slash sword games. Sekiro. I literally have a block button to learn the enemy attack patterns until I feel stylish enough to start engaging with the combat more deeply.

The complaint of 'I don't think this boss should deal 1/3 of your health with every attack' shouldn't have the first response be 'if you dodge every attack, it does 0 damage'. "Get Good" is an extremely basic response and then it just asks another question on the deeper level: what is it that I should be getting good at DOING?

What is it this game wants to be?

I just want ANYBODY other than nintendo to make a metroid metroidvania game rather than a combat focused one. I want to explore without the constant threat of a spike pit taking 1/3 of my health down or without dashing into an enemy in the dark.

Hollow Knight redefined the 'metroid vania' genre into itself for a lot of gamers, and that's fine for people that like hollow knight, I just don't.

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to be honest ive been having the opposite feeling: for a sequel to hollow knight, i expected the beginning to be harder LOL i dont think ive died once in a boss so far? my only deaths so far have been from struggling to pogo, but im just bad at platformers in general. Maybe i got used to nine sols and rain world levels of difficulty/punishment, but silksong starts weirdly nice. im excited for the difficulty ramp up and possible difficulty dlcs though
 
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