What Are You Currently Playing? 5.05: You Are (Not) A Gamer

[Nel_Annette]

Taking a break from RDR to replay Chrono Trigger for the first time since the DS version came out. It's much better without the hype and knowing what you're getting into. And I forgot that Chrono Trigger does something I love and appreciate: it friggin' tells you when the sidequests appear, and basically what they are, so you aren't wandering around wondering if you're missing anything. Gaspar, you loveable old bastard.

[talonmalon333]

It doesn't take that long to activate the speed, and if you're good you know the layout of the rooms you can jump over most obstacles and still maintain your speed. Either way, I find your complaint about Alucard being too low to be more nitpicky than a real problem with the game itself, personally.

Perhaps, but the more important parts of my argument were the level design, challenge, and overall simplicity that really works. The speed part was a minor complaint that I talked more about than I needed to.

Taking a break from RDR to replay Chrono Trigger for the first time since the DS version came out. It's much better without the hype and knowing what you're getting into. And I forgot that Chrono Trigger does something I love and appreciate: it friggin' tells you when the sidequests appear, and basically what they are, so you aren't wandering around wondering if you're missing anything. Gaspar, you loveable old bastard.

I'm not totally sure what you mean here. However, I first played CT knowing of the hype and then finding it to be at least as good as people said.

[Nel_Annette]

My first time playing CT was the DS version, and after growing up on a generation of RPGs that exceeded 60+ hours, I beat CT in about 14 hours and just found the plot very short. It was just kind of a "that's it?" moment. But replaying it now, and knowing how the plot goes, it feels much more epic now that I know what the biggest plot points are and how the story goes. It's a bit hard to explain.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

That may be why Chrono Trigger is the closest that I've ever come to finishing an RPG (I literally made it to just before the final boss fight). I actually enjoyed doing the side-quests in this game, and what I liked about the main story is that it didn't feel like it was filled with needless padding that plague most other RPGs (IMO). Sure, a lot of other JRPGs last 60+ hours, but a lot of that time comes from padding and filler that drag the experience down for me, and a lot of that comes in the form of grinding which I hate. With CT I never felt the need to grind, I loved that there were no random battles in the game, and in general it felt to be just the right length for me (I take my time with games, and this one took me about 20 hours). One day I may go back to it to finish off the final fight with Lavos, but overall this is probably the only JRPG I ever really liked (along with the half of FFXI that I played), and one of the few RPGs that I really enjoyed to begin with. Its still not something I'd consider a favorite, but I can definitely see why its so well-loved.

[gunswordfist]

Super Metroid is great. The wall jump is a little finicky, but just about everything in Super Metroid is great.

Yeah, the wall jump is my only complaint.

[gunswordfist]

Taking a break from RDR to replay Chrono Trigger for the first time since the DS version came out. It's much better without the hype and knowing what you're getting into. And I forgot that Chrono Trigger does something I love and appreciate: it friggin' tells you when the sidequests appear, and basically what they are, so you aren't wandering around wondering if you're missing anything. Gaspar, you loveable old bastard.

Whoa, that's a neat feature. I am a sucker for finding hidden quests but I wouldn't mind a bit of that.

[gunswordfist]

I started to really play Sleeping Days yesterday, I believe.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I finally managed to get through all of arcade mode in Garou: Mark of the Wolves, WITHOUT having to reduce the difficulty. That said, I still only ended it by having the boss fight with Grant, as my score wasn't nearly high enough to unlock the boss fight with Kain after that and to get my character's ending. And of course I still suck a ton at this game as just getting up to Grant had me seeing the continue screen many times over as I had to learn how to properly fight against each character that I faced. Freeman was the most annoying as I swear that he kept pulling out those stupid-ass claw moves out of nowhere. Oddly enough, I beat Grant on my first try with 2 KO's in a row. I actually realized that its not a wise choice to try and doll out special attacks on the computer unless you can pull them off extremely fast and have reliable responsiveness to your input, otherwise its just an invitation to get your ass whooped as punishment for botching an attack. Stringing together simple combos of normal punches and kicks was much more effective against all CPU enemies in general in this game.

Believe it or not, while I still suck at this game despite having improved a lot from how much I initially sucked at it, I owe most of that improvement to Street Fighter, since this game shares really similar core mechanics with that game in terms of pulling off special moves and its TOP moves are basically this game's equivalent of Street Fighter's Supers. The thing is I feel that SSF4 did a good job of making this sort of combat more understandable to me, so when I went back and applied some of the same concepts to GMOW, my gameplay actually got better for it. That's not to say that this is the same sort of game, as I'm sure at a higher and more competent level of play the vast differences between this and Street Fighter can be seen, but all I'm saying is that on a very basic level this game shares a lot of the same core mechanics as Street Fighter games.

Also I can now say that Desensitized was wrong in this write-up for this game in our Top 100 Greatest Video Games list. It is not accessible to newcomers at all....assuming you want to at least be able to play this game competently enough to not be completely embarrassed by even the standard CPU. This game will beat you into the ground until you can learn how to play it properly, and its still whooping my ass a whole 3 months after I first got it (granted that I haven't been playing it at regular intervals). Of course, I have no problem with that, as I love a good challenge, but I'm just saying that the fact of the matter is that this game is in fact one of those games that will kick any newcomer's ass until they learn how to play it the hard way, through commitment and practice. Overall, though, I'm really enjoying the game for that very reason. If it was too easy, I'd have gotten bored of it already due to its admittedly limited roster of characters and lack of extra content (and the fact that I have no human opponents to play it against).

[Grave]

Believe it or not, while I still suck at this game despite having improved a lot from how much I initially sucked at it, I owe most of that improvement to Street Fighter, since this game shares really similar core mechanics with that game in terms of pulling off special moves and its TOP moves are basically this game's equivalent of Street Fighter's Supers.

At it's core most, if not, all 2D fighters core mechanics came from Street Fighter 2 (pretty sure you knew that. Thought I'd just point that out anyway).

Also I can now say that Desensitized was wrong in this write-up for this game in our Top 100 Greatest Video Games list. It is not accessible to newcomers at all....assuming you want to at least be able to play this game competently enough to not be completely embarrassed by even the standard CPU.

Perhaps I should actually read this stuff instead of look at the pictures .

[Spark Of Spirit]

I said it was accessible in learning the controls. If you thought I meant the CPU was accessible then yeah, I was lying.

It's an SNK game, the CPU wants you to cry.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I said it was accessible in learning the controls. If you thought I meant the CPU was accessible then yeah, I was lying.

It's an SNK game, the CPU wants you to cry.

Heh, Yeah, compared to this the CPU in SSF4 is a joke....well, actually I can't really say that as I have yet to turn up the diffiulty on the CPU in that game. However, I don't think I want to in fear that the CPU will then becomes cheap (like Seth), rather than more challenging in a fair way. I'll probably at least bump that game's difficulty up to hard mode eventually, though.

I actually like the difficulty in GMOW. For the most part it feels fair (only Freeman ever feels cheap to me, but I'm sure that's also because I just suck at reading his attacks), and it makes it interesting to keep playing as its very rewarding to get better at the game. I only hate tough CPU when it is downright unfair and takes advantage of the fact that its computer-controlled by having the enemies have insanely fast reflexes that aren't humanly possible just to artificially increase the difficulty. Dead or Alive 4 abused this type of cheap AI and its one of the things that really stopped me from enjoying that game at all.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, I decided to make room for trying to install the Halo 4 multiplayer components and finally give that element of the game a shot. I deleted 2 Max Payne and Resident Evil 4 (which I can always re-download at any time, and I still kept the save data that I had for each), as I thought that I needed at least 8 GB of free space to install the game. Well, as it turns out, wherever I read that was lying to me as it only takes up 3.5 GB of space altogether (though its still ridiculous that it needs to be installed to your hard drive just so that you can play it at all). So, I really deleted RE4 for nothing, but like I said, I can re-install it for free at any time I see fit. Here's what happened, though. I finished installing all of that Halo 4 multiplayer content from disc 2 and it then prompted me to re-insert disc 1 so that I could access that content. When I popped in disc 1, I was prompted to install an update to my game, which I was expecting given that this is the first time that I was going online with the game, and its completely normal for XBOX360 games to prompt you for that, so I didn't think anything of it. I installed it, and then when I tried to boot up my game, my damn XBOX360 said that it couldn't read the disc, so I either had to clean the disc and re-insert it or turn off the console and then turn it back on. I tried both options twice each, to no avail. Then I did the obvious thing and deleted that update, and when I tried to boot up the game it worked fine again, but of course it booted me from XBOX Live. So then I tried re-installing the update and encountered the exact same problem.

So what we have here is an update that refuses to allow me to play this game online. And this is pretty much why today's Microsoft sucks ass....hard ass.

Anyways, I deleted all of the Halo 4 content that I had just installed and was about to re-download Resident Evil 4 and Max Payne, but then I realized that I didn't really plan to replay either of those games anytime too soon, so I found that this was the perfect opportunity for me to finally download Ninja Gaiden Black as its been quite a while since I played that game, and being that it takes up nearly 6 GB of storage space, this would probably be the only time that I could have enough space to spare for it. My college semester starts tomorrow so its not like I'll have a lot of time to play video games, but I figured it'd be nice to switch up between Ninja Gaiden Black and Devil May Cry 3 in my spare time. These games were actually released within the same general time-frame (within a year of each other if you count the original releases of both, or even the enhanced editions of both). In that regard, I consider the best version of Ninja Gaiden (Ninja Gaiden Black) and the best version of Devil May Cry 3 (Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening- Special Edition) to be the height of the rivalry between these 2 legendary hack n' slash series, back at a time when they both had a lot of dignity to their names (before Hayashi killed the NG series with NG3, and Capcom alienated the core DMC fan-base with Ninja Theory's westernized take on "DmC"). For that reason, it'll be interesting for me to play these games back to back.

[Grave]

I said it was accessible in learning the controls. If you thought I meant the CPU was accessible then yeah, I was lying.

It's an SNK game, the CPU wants you to cry.

Heh, Yeah, compared to this the CPU in SSF4 is a joke....well, actually I can't really say that as I have yet to turn up the diffiulty on the CPU in that game. However, I don't think I want to in fear that the CPU will then becomes cheap (like Seth), rather than more challenging in a fair way. I'll probably at least bump that game's difficulty up to hard mode eventually, though.

You may want to stay with the standard difficulty. I was told not to use the CPU as an opponent to practice against (use only for combo practice) because Capcom made the CPU to counter any and everything you do (especially on higher difficulties) so you can't practice safe jump setups and whatnot (good luck jumping in on a shoto)

Halo: Reach
If there was one area I hated in the game it's where I'm at now. I just finished rescuing civilians and met up with Noble One. I hate doing all this flying and fighting hunters with guns that're not that great against them. Other than that, yeah, still enjoying the game. The game still looks very impressive, but then again, graphically, Halo has always impressed me when it came to the graphics and landscape, but the landscape that stands out the most is the snowy area in Halo 3. (My goodness that was a work of art) I may buy Combat Evolved (the new one) just to look at those graphics again.

Warrior's Orochi 3
Just unlocked Kotoro Fuma. While he's no Ayane (Ayame?) or Ryu, he's pretty fun to use, and much better than Hanzo Hotori (?). I might have to get Samurai Warriors just to see the story of some of these characters because right now I'm at a loss. And then Mitsuhide Akechi. This name sounds familiar to me, like he was in Onimusha or something.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Playing Ristar on my Wii-U.

If you can't play this game with a good d-pad (like Sega's, Nintendo's, or the fightpad) then don't bother playing it. I tried to play it on my PSP and I can't grab on angles which kills most of the fun, then went back to my classic controller and got into the groove again. This is a pure d-pad game, and it's one of the best cases for why playing any 2D game without a d-pad is a fruitless endeavor.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

While I'm not denying that a good d-pad is the best way to play classic 2D platformers, those that support an analogue stick can be controlled just fine via that option if you are used to that method. Many people have done this (including myself), as I have no problem aiming in 8 directions with a stick since I've been used to using sticks for so long.