What Game/s are You Playing? Daily / Whenever Check :) (GAMEPLAY)

[YoshiM]

"Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D" has been occupying my time lately. I got up to the Shadow Temple and didn't feel like back tracking to come back as kid Link to solve the place. Not that it'd be a slog thanks to the ocarina but I think I had my fill of this for a while.

I worked on my TV "island" in the basement (a school-issue wide metal bookshelf with a short file cabinet, a pair of square post cut offs with my 13" CRT TV on top) and have decided to use my "modern retro" systems. I have my AVS set up along with my 7800+. I have a Best Buy brand HDMI-to-RCA converter that does a decent job at getting these systems to work on my circa 2006 TV. Games I played last night were "Asteroids Deluxe" and "Bounty Bob Strikes Back".

I had a great time with "Asteroids Deluxe", more than I thought I did. The first time I played it was with one of my twin step-daughters. It was.....ok.....though I could feel her general disinterest in this type of game but she played with me anyway. This time I played solo and found it to be a better experience. I think I nabbed 20K points, which I wanna say is good for this first-timer on Intermediate.

"Bounty Bob" took a bit for me to "get". If I played this back in the day prior to playing "Super Mario Bros", I might have had an easier time with it. As Yoda said, I had to "unlearn what I had learned". I could not diagonal jump from a run, which found me sailing across the screen only to flatten like a pixelated pancake a couple floors down. I also couldn't just willy-nilly jump over a mutant. It seems pixel perfect for collision as I tried avoiding said mutant and clipped my foot on its head. Pancake city again. Once it clicked that the "treats" that make you invulnerable positioned in the proper order for a good claim run (at least so far), I got better. I also wanted to get better as it was a lot of fun once I got the rhythm.

On a non-game note, found out my NES might be having some video issues. In SMB the blues were really blue, like "color of modern Mario's overalls" blue. It was a neat effect but as I only play this every couple years or so on my 3DS, I didn't think about it too much. When I hooked up the AVS for testing with the "normal" palette the sky was light blue. I held up the SMB section in the "Nintendo Player's Guide" and sho nuff....that's the blue it's supposed be. So now I'll be playing with the AVS and I'll store my NES for now.

[JSoup]

I never post in these threads because I just never play anything other than WoW these days. But I randomly got a reply e-mail for RFGeneration's 'what are you playing' thread after four years, so. Gonna copy and past what I said.

Most of my game time goes to WoW these days, but I have been fiddling with:

Sun Wukong vs Robot - Got it on the PSN for Stars points (hahaha....) and it's....not amazing. It looks good and sounds great, but it's really focused on forcing the player to brute force things. Feels like the dev was trying to do a bullethell-Souls-like mix in a Metroidvania and just couldn't pull it off.

One Man's Trash - Picked it up on a whim. A take on that Digging A Hole game centered around a parody of that cryptobro who lost a thumbdrive with craploads of bitcoin in it. It's...interesting. Dig for junk, sell junk, buy upgrades that let you dig deeper and sell more junk. I don't know that it's amazing, but I ended up sinking six hours into it without realizing.

Tower Wizard - I'm starting to warm back up to idle games, now that titles with actual ends in mind are being made. This is short, maybe 7 hours to complete on the high end (I did it in 5 1/2), but really good. Another game were I sunk much more time into it than intended in one sitting.

[kupomogli]

Replayed Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin. If you haven't played the game it's worth getting, and actually I feel like it's a must own. I'm not much of a fan of the beat em up genre, but Urban Reign, God Hand, the Yakuza games, FotNS Lost Paradise(Yakuza,) and Stranger of Paradise are the best in the 3D beat em up genre. You may hear everyone say "it's a souls-like, etc, etc." A "souls-like" is literally just a checkpoint system with recovery items that replenish, except the Souls games are less linear, they have a little bit of exploration in their level design, like a Zelda. Stranger of Paradise is more like any other game, yes, you have these cubes that are your bonfire, and enemies will respawn when resting there, but the level design each time you get to the new cube is almost as linear as it gets. So the only similarity this has to a souls=like is literally the recovery items between each checkpoint, otherwise it's like any other game with a checkpoint system.

You're not going to really going to be playing Stranger of Paradise slowly like you would a Souls game. You can, sure, but when you're not attacking, enemies break gauge is recovering. There are two ways to gain max MP though, defeat and break enemies, getting an instant kill against them like Ninja Gaiden 2/Sigma 2 execution. The other way is to use soul shield to defend against an attack, each way giving you a permanent MP boost, while attacking or soul shield will increase your current MP. Using special attacks or magic costs MP, so you use special attacks that cost MP and then when enemies are staggered you use regular attacks to gain some MP, etc.

Similar to God Hand, you can somewhat customize your character's skills. Every single weapon has the same basic combo attacks, but your special attacks are customizable. Each job class has a unique special, and then all of the other attacks will carry over outside of the main job attack. So every fist skil, every sword skill, etc, all will be usable unless specifically attached to the jobs main skill. After the basic jobs though, the skills are usually more unique, buffs, maybe magic or special skills rather than just another skill. So you press R2 to use one of the skills, R1 to attack with a basic attack up to three times and each time you can hit R2 to use the connected skill, and then during your attacks you can hit forward, baack, side attack, or charge an attack and each of these can be equipped with a skill. So to me, I feel like each weapon is more like a "class" and each of the classes are just individual skills that you can choose.

Equipment has synergy which you get with each class, and later on with the end game content, you can have equipment that has two class synergies together. This is a complaint I have though, because you can equip your equipment to be more powerful, even at a lowever average equipment level, but regardless of your stats if your equipment is a lower level than the stages recommended level, your stats don't matter. Equipment level above all else matters when determining break damage, damage, and defense. If you've got a low equipment level, it doesn't matter how good your stats are, it is going to be much much more difficult of a game. It's pretty stupid that your stats can be better with lower level equipment and better synergies, basically a better build, but your strength is tied to your equipment level really defeating the purpose of really customizing your equipment. Now sure, you can customize your equipment and you can spend crystals to increase the levels of your equipment, but the amount of crystals it takes to update your equipment is far more than you'll have.

So that does remove a lot of the customization even when playing the end game content. Because the customization is just either "cap everything out then customize" or "grind for crystals."

However, even with those issues, I would say if you were to play the main game on either action difficulty, the game is still very difficult and I feel is really well balanced. Hard difficulty is also well balanced but bosses are much more difficult if you don't get weapon upgrades, but you can equip whatever armor to have the max level armor and then use anima crystals to increase the stats of your weapon and then just increase either attack or break damage on the weapon specifically for the bosses. You'd have more than enough anima crystals to do thos. Also use whatever anima crystals you get for classes you have no intent on using, which I'd prioritize anything that uses the katana which imo is trash.

Now, as for the story, it's really hard to say if it's actually bad or not. I'd say yes, it's not a good story, but it's not boring. Final Fantasy 16 story is boring AF except for a few main chapters that are where it's at it's best, but Stranger of Paradise doesn't have a good story, but nothing that is particularly boring. The storyline actually starts getting good at the very end of the story, like, the last few chapters have the storyline start getting good, and I mean really good, but everything up to that isn't, and it's because they wanted to give it this big twist at the end that the story is written in this clever way that is what makes it so bad just so they could make it come together at the very end.

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I never buy DLC, I never buy digital, I actually decided that I was going to buy the season pass next time it was on sale and coincidentally, it was on sale this Tuesday for $5.99 so I decided to buy it.

Once I finished the game, you actually have a lot of end game content on the disc that's not even required for DLC. You have Chaos difficulty which doubles or triples the enemy AI speed. So enemies will attack far more often on Chaos than on action and hard. Now, I played this end game content without level grinding equipment and that also means I didn't use the level 200 equipment that the game gives you for getting the season pass. Additionally, I would say if you don't want to keep having to equip everything manually, DO NOT INSTALL THE SEASON PASS until you get through the main game on Chaos difficulty. Because there's no way to stop the game from equipping you with that equipment. It's very annoying.

As I got further into Chaos difficulty though, I noticed that I'd be getting killed in one or two hits, I dealt almost no break damage despite having the highest damage I could have even higher than higher level equipment. I finally decided to equip my highest level equipment on the last stage, that's when I finallyh found out that the equipment average level determines your stats even if your stats reduce, once again, you deal more damage, deal more break damage, and take less damage. Again something I feel is very stupid but now that I understand it, the Chaos difficulty would have been easier if I did this earlier. I would have just equipment whatever was the highest level at all times.

Now the DLC, which I haven't finished is just replaying the same stages with alternate versions of the stages, basically what's essentially the games side quests. The last section is sort of a gauntlet where you fight multiple enemie and then a boss, but it's just another boss you've already fought. But just now in Bahamut difficulty which the AI now attacks slightly more faster than the Chaos difficulty, but otherwise is the same.

You collect rat tails for finishing battles up to level 300 which allow you to build up your classes further. Increases stats further as well as give you some upgrades to your skills. I think the upgrades are only on the base skills, I'm not sure if there are any new skills actually. Either way the games DLC, seems to just be a lot of grinding, feels like the real extra contact is a few and far between, a cutscene here and there.

Basically I decided well, I just finished the game back to back twice, the latest difficulty being on Chaos, I'm not going to essentially beat the game a third time for what feels a bit of half assed content. And that's only the Bahamut DLC, do I need to grind more for the second and third DLC? Thanks but no thanks.

So initially I was disappointed that this game had no complete edition, but after I bought the DLC and I feel the DLC is just little more than fluff. I really enjoyed the main game as it was, and I feel the other content just isn't really worth it unless you just want to already replay the game, but again, it feels like a few pieces of fluff rather than real content.

If you haven't bought Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin, especially if you love 3D beat em ups, would really recommend the game. Don't ignore it just because you might not like souls-likes or RPGs. If you like beat em ups then the game is must own. I don't like beat em ups, but for the few that I actually do like, I feel like this is a modern day of God Hand. God Hand though is a 10/10, Stranger of Paradise is a 7/10, and then a "decent game" would be a 5/10, mediocre 4/10, and bad 3/10 or less. Just to give an idea of my rating system since most people have this really skewed look about anything that's not an 8/10 or higher. My 4/10 is probably IGN's 7/10. I hardly give anything a 9/10 or 10/10 unless it's absolutely deserving.