The Nintendo Switch

nah more like RTS
Darkest Dungeon was fun up until the point where it pushed against my OCD. just not for me.

Kotaku called it an "upsetting medieval stress management sim" which is enough to tell me to steer clear.

Darkest Dungeon is def not an RTS. It's turn based which means that you have all the time you want to choose your action. It's like the Final Fantasy games.

So when people talk about XCom or Mario/Rabbids, that is ... turn-based?

All this terminology, I've generally been googling as I encounter them, but is there a one-stop game slang lexicon?

sorry, my bad, no idea why i said RTS. The opposite of RTS.

So when people talk about XCom or Mario/Rabbids, that is ... turn-based?

correct

darkest dungeon rules for like a week and then you'll be like fuck this shit is impossible

but it's a fun week!

oof. that's a turn off description for me too. but who knows, Stardew Valley somehow just hit that right balance for me, despite coming precariously close to being too much chore

in terms of stress vs chill, darkest dungeon and stardew are absolute polar opposites. darkest dungeon is fantastic but its a total bastard.

Is it just because so much of it is based on random chance, like a roll of the dice, essentially?

It is very difficult, a lot of it the difficulty is chance-based, and it’s permadeath (you spend a lot of time leveling up your crew, but if they die, they’re gone forever). In fact, succeeding in the game requires you to identify a strategy for dealing with the death and all your important characters and adapting. It is very stressful.

permadeath was what turned me away from the game. plus it's designed so that you simply CAN'T max out characters / properly balance healing / etc. you gotta cope with bad choices and why do i wanna do that in a vidyagame?

ugh I bought that game ON IPAD at some point but hadn't played it yet & you guys are making me want to delete it now bc the stress sounds awful & besides I need an excuse to whittle down the queue so GONE

well just to be contrarian I'm going to go play it ON IPAD and have a blast

*pouring sweat from entire face* nah these wings? these wings aren't that hot

rip tombot

it’s sad, he was a contrarian

there's literally a stress mechanic in the game

fwiw I think it’s one of the best 50 games or so I’ve played the last few years

it's really good and tactically fascinating. def worth a look tho i never got very far in it. maybe beat the first 3 or so bosses and then got stuck on this witch who kept throwing my party members into cauldrons and killing them. the really frustrating thing about it is that progress at a certain point is extremely slow. you'll keep wiping parties just trying to put one serviceable team together and then you're key team member gets some terribly debilitating flaw and then dies and then you're back to square one.

your*

it looks like a pretty straightforward, typical 'climb the stairs' progression type game where you gradually build up and improve as the game gets harder and you work your way to the top. it actually turns out to be more like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGPLNQzKGSA

it is great tho. it is a lot of fun and then it's not, and that's when you stop.

yeah that's more or less how i etc

there's literally a stress mechanic in the game

That game Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube was rad, it's the one that, the worse you did, the more it would fuck with you. It would, for example, suddenly ask you if you wanted to delete your saves, and when you in a panic hit "cancel" it would treat it like you hit "yes" and then declare "delete successful!" or whatever. Even though it didn't.

agreed on slippery stairs metaphor. Dark Souls was tough but fair. Darkest Dungeon is tough but not fair.

unfair not necessarily a problem and mitigating the unfairness a big theme in classic roguelikes. to dd's credit i'm thinking right now about booting it up again (this would be my third go) bc there's so much that /is/ compelling about it

correct me if i'm wrong, but i think you have a history of playing (and deep love for) immensely frustrating games though?

In my opinion XCOM and Faster Than Light are more stressful.

maybe FTL on hard difficulty

fwiw I think it’s one of the best 50 games or so I’ve played the last few years

*tries to count whether I can remember 50 video games I've played in my entire life*

where are your priorities, sic? ;)

i probably way overestimated the number of games i've actually spent quality time with, though. that number would be closer to 20 over a couple years. i often download demos or play free games on iOS for an hour or two, though.

I play the first 30% of a ton of games but far fewer to completion

sad but true for me.

I don't find it sad, if a game doesn't hook me or loses its hook on me, im not going to grit my teeth and push forward, I'll just play something else and maybe try it again later. There are even games that I wouldnt hesitate to call excellent despite them losing their grip on me for a while - I played breath of the wild for like 25 hours and then put it on the shelf for several months before it hooked me in for another session.

where are your priorities, sic? ;)

in the last year I've played a Walking Dead big gun and a sit-on-motorcycle game in an arcade for five minutes each, a few games of Galaga and one of Ms Pac-Man in a bar, half an hour of Mario Kart at a friend's, and probably 300 hours of Angry Birds Friends on trains and toilets

I REALLY REALLY WANT to spend hours and hours a week playing Mario Odyssey though!

I was on the fence about trying out Dark Souls when it is released, but I think I have come around. I think the secret is to realize the game is about patience and learning from mistakes. Nothing is terribly fast, nothing is unbeatable. You just have to persevere until you figure out how to beat it.

otm. and you will always be improving. you can't lose any items aside from souls, which is great cos souls are what you get from killing everything in the game. so you can do suicide runs where you see an item guarded by a daunting enemy, run and get it, immediately die, and it's yours forever.

if you are in a new area w few souls you have nothing to lose and are free to explore. if you are in a new area with a ton of souls because you didn't bother to level up, you may be about to learn a lesson in patience ;-) you can level up at any bonfire (checkpoint) in the game and levels are designed so that it is possible to run past every enemy and fight the boss. also if you have to go pick up the kids or something you can bring up the menu and hit quit, DS saves your game right where you stand. it's more or less a menu-drive pause button.

im looking forward to picking up the remaster. i never beat two of the DLC bosses and i barely touched the online component. it would be fun to play co-op with some newcomers on ILG (or just hear the stories of first playthroughs)

I guess if I ever finish Zelda, Dark Souls seems like the next level up.

Is Skyrim worth it? I played a little on the PS3 but it seemed kind of charmless and everywhere was brown.

Skyrim looks pretty drab after playing a bunch of zelda and mario and xenoblade

so does dark souls though tbh

what's xenoblade like? looks pretty

if you’re a fan of big anime boobs you’re in for a helluva time from what i can tell

if you like Zelda imo Souls is a good next step.

Skyrim would be more in the direction of an open world. there are literally hundreds of quests you can take on, all of them involving the same dozen or so dungeons cut and pasted to infinity. quest #500 may take place in the same dungeon as your first quest, fighting the same enemies even. the story is loosely attached to this gargantuan world, a supposedly all-important civil war having barely an impact on minute-to-minute gameplay. but im not gonna rag on Skyrim too much, i played it forever, it was a very fun RPG and if you want to customize your character and become an alchemist you can loose yourself doing that. if you end up playing, do the wizard school quest, cos once you have killed a dragon you have pretty much played the entire game.

Dark Souls is a hand-crafted world. it is more like Metroid or Castlevania in that respects. you will backtrack through areas, unlocking elevators, the world revealing a tightly-compacted no-loading-screen spiral of a sprawling dark fantasy world. each area has unique textures, unique atmosphere, unique enemies, traps, shortcuts, etc. it is like the NES Castlevania but that linearity split into a cool unlockable puzzle of a seamless world. yes the graphics are ugly and almost muddy but the art design demands this because this is an ugly, muddy, dark world. the presentation can be stark in places but that just makes the prettier stuff (the crystal caves, the intro post-boss area) stand out all the more.

enemy design is continuously evolving as you traverse the world and the different environments. there are no generic dungeons, there is a basement, there is a swamp, there is a magical forest, for this is a realized world. the enemies, including the bosses, are all designed to live in their environments. Dark Souls III takes cues from Shadow of the Colossus for a lot of bosses, and imo there is that level of dramatic presentation, of a real weight and character design in use, in Dark Souls. so many bosses have really cool intro cutscenes that are very impressive and terrifying intimidating on first view. it is just one more element that makes victory soooo satisfying in this game. the feeling you get after defeating a boss the first time is incredible. the lack of a map and the lack of a pause and all kinds of other design decisions weigh on the player experience and inform the world and this experience. Dark Souls is a really well and holistically designed game. the world design cannot be under-estimated. the first area you see after defeating the intro boss is so gorgeous and imo competes with stuff released nowadays. add to that some quirky and non-stock dark fantasy stuff like the giant crow and the slow but heavy-hitting boxing mushrooms.

/rant out lol sorry i probably sound like a nut. there is just a lot to the game that is pretty unique and fun. hope some people play the Switch version (and i will be down for co-op with any ILGers!)

once you have killed a dragon you have pretty much played the entire game.

you kill a dragon in like the fourth mission!

Thanks Adam! I will def check that out now.

this looks cool too

http://www.korg.com/us/products/software/korg_gadget_for_nintendo_switch/

what's xenoblade like? looks pretty

― Chuck_Tatum, Friday, January 19, 2018 6:25 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's an extremely anime JRPG. excellent music and environments, complicated but fun combat system. starts off in a very shonen style (teenage male protagonist, sort of a saturday morning cartoon vibe to the writing, the power of love and friendship etc) and slowly morphs into the weirdo religion/mythology/philosophy stuff that the xeno games are all known for. it's uneven, overambitious, and i loved it a lot. you probably have to be down with anime and anime tropes as a prerequisite for liking it though.

that's a good post, adam

So in Dark Souls, how much of it is micro-managing all these little details like strength or agility or whatever? And does it give any direction of how to find the thing to do the thing, or is it a lot of random discoveries or, worse, making it to, say, a battle and finding out you needed to snag something earlier that is essential to victory?

I guess I have months to prep for this. ;) But I have watched a couple of clips and people are all "normally the blowdart toxin would be a lot more effective, but since I am wearing the ring of whatever I am more resistant." Like, his finding that hypothetical ring and learning its powers just trial and error, or is it something you know you have to keep an eye out for and put on at the right time? Or another example, I saw a clip where a guy found a better shield in some hard to reach place. Did he know the shield was out there to be found? Or might one get stuck getting their ass kicked over and over again because they didn't have the better armor or sword or whatever that was buried in some grave somewhere or something like that?