It's Video Game News

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s. goblin
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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by s. goblin » Fri Dec 09, 2022 2:52 am

Skeletor wrote:
this game feels like i was teleported to ps2 era. poor graphics, lots of popping in, empty static world, terrible camera, and lots of like places where you can pointlessly die because you couldn't tell where you were in 3d and the area happens to be surrounded by water
so it's a faithful sonic game

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by haplo » Fri Dec 09, 2022 3:16 am

s. goblin wrote:
Skeletor wrote:this game feels like i was teleported to ps2 era. poor graphics, lots of popping in, empty static world, terrible camera, and lots of like places where you can pointlessly die because you couldn't tell where you were in 3d and the area happens to be surrounded by water
so it's a faithful sonic game
yeah I feel like I accurately described it in my original post despite not playing it

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Khaos » Fri Dec 09, 2022 5:57 am

sonic adventure 2 was a good 3d sonic game, fight me

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Skeletor » Sat Dec 10, 2022 7:09 pm

haplo wrote: Fri Dec 09, 2022 3:16 am
s. goblin wrote:
Skeletor wrote:this game feels like i was teleported to ps2 era. poor graphics, lots of popping in, empty static world, terrible camera, and lots of like places where you can pointlessly die because you couldn't tell where you were in 3d and the area happens to be surrounded by water
so it's a faithful sonic game
yeah I feel like I accurately described it in my original post despite not playing it
it is actually fun though
wow, [you]. that all sounds terrible. i hope it gets better for you

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by s. goblin » Sun Dec 11, 2022 11:25 pm

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Skeletor » Sun Dec 11, 2022 11:40 pm

20% through sonic frontiers (probably, 1 of 5 map areas done). it's very much structured like breath of the wild. there's portals through the map that are like shrines, though instead of puzzles they're these more classic sonic challenge levels. the mini bosses and bosses are pretty epic looking, i kept thinking shadow of the colossus because of how you scale some of them, it has more that feel than the giant beasts in breath of the wild i guess

nothing is particularly challenging so far, it's certainly more spectacle

i hope the world is less static on these later maps. there's a line in the game about how empty and static the first world is, i hope that was just some bad creative decision on the first world and not a writer trying to paper over a game that really could have used another year to bake
wow, [you]. that all sounds terrible. i hope it gets better for you

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Dantes » Mon Dec 12, 2022 1:43 pm

seathesee wrote: Wed Nov 23, 2022 4:18 am
Dantes wrote: Tue Nov 22, 2022 8:07 pm I was really curious since the recent (post 1.5/1.6 patch) reviews have been pretty consistently ranking it a 9/10 game.
I think if you value some combination of storytelling, vibe, edginess, big picture setting, variety of npcs, and punchy dialogue more then other things you can get from a game a 9/10 probably feels right.
This is a well realized gaming experience.

At one point as I was fighting through a Tyger Claw controlled whore house trying to finish an objective, I realized that I had basically just done a Takeshi Kovacs on the place. Since then I've learned more of the game systems and I've refined my V, I'm now very much a Ghost Netrunner. I'm maximizing for Ninjutsu/Quck Hacking and it is brutally effective. I haven't even called Panem yet and I'm tearing around Night City cleaning up all the crime activity.
Pour like Hemingway's last call.

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Mon Dec 12, 2022 1:49 pm

Has anyone tried Marvel's Midnight Suns? What I've seen looks about 50% awesome (turn-based deckbuilder but with positioning and cool environmental combat, sort of a blend of StS and XCOM), and 50% terrible (cringy dialog, microtransaction cosmetics and mobile-style grind in a full-priced game).

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Blissful » Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:12 pm

Ashenai wrote: Mon Dec 12, 2022 1:49 pm Has anyone tried Marvel's Midnight Suns? What I've seen looks about 50% awesome (turn-based deckbuilder but with positioning and cool environmental combat, sort of a blend of StS and XCOM), and 50% terrible (cringy dialog, microtransaction cosmetics and mobile-style grind in a full-priced game).
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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Blissful » Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:17 pm

I didn't play this. Here is a review from a guy i know who did

Spoiler!
Marvel's Midnight Sus is a turn based tactical cardgame made by the Nu-Xcom guys from firaxis.  It blends turn based tactics, third person walk-em-up, dating sim, and collectable card game. 

The Good:
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The tactical layer gameplay is very good.  Each hero brings 8 cards into battle which means that your deck is neither so large to be unreliable nor so small you can consistently redraw the exact cards you want. 

Heroes have unique playstyles and even heroes who are filling the same niche do so in ways that still let them have a unique style.  Captain America and Wolverine, for example, are both high hp tanky guys who are supposed to prevent the other team members from taking hits.  Steve achieves this by building up a ton of armor over several turns taunting enemies with abilities.  Most of Logan's attacks have taunt and chain tags so he can do a math problem to figure out exactly how much damage he can take without dying, then use the easy access to lifesteal to recover the health next turn(and he generates a revive if he gets downed.)

With a few exceptions (Ghost Rider is extremely good at everything, Scarlet witch suck ass) every hero is about equal in power level.  Hunter, the player character, is highly customizable both cosmetically and in playstyle.  I think she has 40+ unique cards, while i'd say other heroes have somewhere between 12-15.  The hunter's light/dark gimmick isn't overplayed. You never lose access to cards and your alignment points don't do anything other than unlock new passives (and any unlocked passive is kept.) You can swap your passives at any time with no restrictions.

The supervillains are also cool.  During general missions they will sometimes appear as reinforcements (like the Chosen in XCOM 2) and they all change the encounter in unique ways. Like the Chosen, they have epic witty banter with the heroes.  Unlike the Chosen, they actively try to damage you until you die. 

The Bad:
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The difficulty can be changed at any time, which is sort of silly.  Worse, difficulty is just a linear scale of enemy numbers going up.  It's especially annoying considering higher difficulties would require more use of crowd control, taunting, healing, etc but the game calls you gay for doing anything other than ramming into people with your car. 

Missions are rated from 1 to 3 stars, and to get 3 stars the player needs to complete the mission in either 2 turns of the minimum number of turns before the mission ends.  Bad draws, ambushes, or taking heroes who can't deal tons of damage in a single turn all make getting a perfect rating impossible.  There's no reward for a perfect rating and in fact trying to get it means you're going to miss out on secondary objectives like interrogations or looting.  It's obnoxious and pointless, the game is just calling you a noob for playing on a difficulty above hard.

Every night you have to run around the abbey opening loot crates, harvesting plants, and solving puzzles.  This stops being fun exploration and starts being a chore when you realize that the loot crates respawn, herbs are required for the most powerful items, and EMO KIDS will start asking you for packs of herbs to make special cards.  You can probably skip most of this if you don't care about the story but I would imagine on higher difficulties where you actually need to strategically bring and use items it quickly becomes unavoidable.

There's a big lack of enemy diversity, and a lot of the "different" enemies are interchangeable.  Hydra has: gun guy, mace guy, medic, officer, sniper, shield guy, mystic, and vampire thing.  Lilith has dog, shield guy, faceless, and nest mother.  Gun guy and mace guy are functionally identical, which means that there's 11 enemies unique enough to mention.  Of these, the only ones that are important enough to really change how you play are the sniper (stealths and does a KO next turn) and the faceless legion (splits into two units whenever damaged, sometimes splits other guys on their turn.)

Hydra enemies are so similar I still don't really know who does what.  Everyone shoots you, and I know the sniper applies vulnerable, but the rest of the guys are so similar I don't really know who is stunning, weakening, wounding, etc.  For all I know, they just have a small chance to apply a random debuff on hit.

There's a lack of supervillains and a lack of interaction with them.  There's 5 over the course of the game, plus a generic Dread Maiden jobber to fill gaps.  The problem is made worse by the fact that since probably 75% of your missions will be story missions where supervillains won't randomly appear, you rarely actually see them.  In my playthrough I never saw Sabertooth or Hulk outside of their story missions.  Story missions also often kill off supervillains so you will lose the opportunity to encounter them as the game progresses.  By the end of the game the only one left is the dread maiden, who is not particularly epic or awesome.

The forge has tools for crafting cards from blueprints, crafting blueprints from essence, and crafting blueprints from blueprints.  I don't think I ever used this unless someone gave me a quest (teammates give quests) to craft them a card.

The yard is used to upgrade and add modifiers to cards.  Your menu is used to access hero decks to edit and salvage cards.  You need to exit one to access the other.  You need to dive 4 levels deep into menus to go from the "upgrade card" screen to the "edit deck" screen.  What's worse, the forge and the yard are physically distinct locations and you need to run from one to the other if you want to, say, craft a copy of a card and then upgrade it.

The Buggy:

Endgame Spoilers(?) You can't make friends with the hulk.  There's no dating mechanisms for him but Bruce will still ask you to hang out even though it appears to be impossible.  You can't gain friendship points with him through missions or anything.

The last mission is buggy.  Bodies of dead enemies won't clear and just hang around kneeling over.  It's a long mission so by the end of it, it's hard to tell who's alive and whose T-posing.  This doesn't seem to happen anywhere else in the game.

Doctor Strange skins a dog and everyone is okay with it.  I don't know enough about the marvel universe to know if this is intentional.  It would be appreciated if resident expert [you] would chirp in and correct me if this is in fact consistent with his characterization.

A lot of the time I wasn't really sure what was going on in the story missions. Some of this is because Magik is the portal queen and can just instantly teleport anyone anywhere which is great as far as respecting the power fantasy of the character but not so great for explaining why you're at a circus in the arizona desert. On the other hand, the game's defense, whenever a cutscene started up I would usually just stand up and vape or make a coffee or something.

In conclusion, I rate this game fantastic out of a possible marvelous.
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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Blissful » Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:20 pm

It sounds like the tactical layer might actually be as good or better than other firaxis tactics titles, while the strategy layer and window dressing has got a bunch worse. This game is probably less amenable to modding than the XCOM titles were, which makes me less interested because high quality mods were a great part of shaving the rough edges off these games (although it is creditable how well X2 performs unmodded)
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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Blissful » Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:22 pm

I plan to just keep playing marvel snap instead, but if you try this do report back as I'm very interested in tactics games in general and ones by this studio especially
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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Rylinks » Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:23 pm

Blissful wrote:Image
>reading sun tzu instead of clausewitz

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Blissful » Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:30 pm

rylinks that is far from the issue at hand
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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Mon Dec 12, 2022 4:04 pm

Blissful wrote: Mon Dec 12, 2022 3:22 pm I plan to just keep playing marvel snap instead, but if you try this do report back as I'm very interested in tactics games in general and ones by this studio especially
It costs $60 currently, there is zero chance I'm buying it at that price, but I'll probably have some scathing things to say about it in 5 years when I get it in a bundle

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Crunchums » Mon Dec 12, 2022 4:23 pm

the game calls you gay for doing anything other than ramming into people with your car
, repeatedly
u gotta skate

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Mon Dec 12, 2022 4:26 pm

lmao

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Skeletor » Tue Dec 13, 2022 1:38 am

idunno where haplo thread is but this Verse language sounds wild and the first exciting metaverse thing i've ever heard
wow, [you]. that all sounds terrible. i hope it gets better for you

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by haplo » Tue Dec 13, 2022 2:36 am

Skeletor wrote:idunno where haplo thread is but this Verse language sounds wild and the first exciting metaverse thing i've ever heard
It sounds like a lot of academics are interested in it, and I guess you have the fact that it's being forced into Fortnite as a motivator for people to actually use it, so we'll see. I'm not particularly thrilled with the prospect of actually writing code with it especially around some syntax decisions, but they've made some changes for the sake of making it more adoptable so hopefully they continue to do so.

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by haplo » Tue Dec 13, 2022 2:39 am

That said, if the "metaverse" becomes a thing, there's no doubt in my mind that Epic is absolutely the only company in the race that people should be rooting for as far as a principled, open approach to it as a platform.

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Tue Dec 13, 2022 7:23 pm

Yeah I've been watching Northernlion's playthrough of Midnight Suns and this shit is painful. The writing is abysmal, and not even in a funny way where you can really make fun of it, it's just so boring and there's so much of it. There isn't a single character I can give a shit about, least of all the player character.

Northernlion is in rare form, though, I'm having fun watching the let's play. Will not be getting the game.

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Crunchums » Tue Dec 13, 2022 7:24 pm

you could tryin playing a different Midnight Sun :P
u gotta skate

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Tue Dec 13, 2022 7:30 pm

Noted, but I sha'n't be doing that for now

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Tue Dec 13, 2022 7:31 pm

I WILL WATCH HAIBANE RENMEI RYLINKS BACK OFF I SEE YOU THERE

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Khaos » Tue Dec 13, 2022 7:35 pm

watch cyberpunk instead

jeb did and he liked it!

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Crunchums » Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:00 pm

https://dreamlab.gg/ it's video game news
u gotta skate

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:06 pm

oh hell yeah that's the stuff

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:08 pm

I can't believe the days of Thatched Cottage #2 from the Free Medieval Village Asset Library are nearly over!

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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Blissful » Wed Dec 14, 2022 12:47 am

those were perfectly fine days honestly
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Re: It's Video Game News

Post by Ashenai » Wed Dec 14, 2022 6:08 am

I didn't mind them, but I am ready for some bespoke thatched cottages

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