#ranting about videogames

[ce-heich-ce]

I love and hate Shin Megami Tensei 1 so much because its such a game. (long text coming up)

On battles it uses this smart system where they cant fit too many enemies on screen, so the game puts only 1 type of enemy on regular encounters with a number of icons on top of it representing how many enemies are in that group, which is cool, its a smart way of fitting more enemies per battle and you can also know if any of them got hit with a status effects because the icon of the enemy you hit also changes. Now, you might be wondering how you choose which of those enemies and you actually don't, whenever you attack with a single target attack or ability the target is chosen at random, which is a real pain because these enemies come out in numbers of at most 9 per encounter, so hitting the same target twice is hard, you only attack multiple enemies on weapons or spells that target groups of enemies and for the player character that is only reserved for guns and spell stones that you have to buy (and don't do much damage unless you level his magic stat, which is mostly pointless because he can't use magic), with maybe some weapons that attack more than once, not every enemy, but attacking more than once gives you a better chance to do so. Only special battles against bosses or demon tamers have more than 1 type of enemy but there you just choose which group you get to target.

Also the encounter rate is a pain, during the first hours of the game its random how frequent and how unlikely you are to enter a battle, sometimes they appear every few steps and then you can run around tokyo for a while with no enemies showing up, even im dungeons it becomes as random, but then you get to the second part of the game and now you get battles every few steps everywhere, which sucks because you're no longer stuck to following roads in tokyo, you can go anywhere plot allows you to but exploring is unwise because thats when enemies appear in large numbers and you just got there so enemies are stronger than you at that point.

Some dungeons have some traps, like floors that teleport you randomly, make you fall to a floor below, one way doors, spinning floors, poison or even curses depending on your luck stat but they're honestly not that frequent as trapped chests that explode and take 25% of health of EVERY character in your party, that is the worse and it happens very often later in the game.

Something I do like and appreciate is that the game has a big number of enemies you get to fight with their own types and origins (though a lot reuse sprites with different colours and some modifications to turn them into something else) and thanks to the demon negotiation system you can talk to them and get a few good outcomes, like having them join you, give money, go away or give you items and since enemies are different they react accordingly depending on your friendly or hostile approach to them.

Getting to use most of the enemies you find is cool too because you have an infinite amount of teams you can make with them and whenever you get tired or don't like one of them you can fuse them to get something different, sometimes a better one or a worse one and sometimes ones you don't encounter naturally, making them even rarer and worth trying.

Having alignments define how the story goes is kind of cool, depending on your choices and interactions with demons you can shift to law or chaos and some plot points later in the story reflect that, like some demons helping you out while others impede your quest, getting alignment specific gear and demon allies, etc, which is good because it gives you an incentive to replay the game.

the final part of the game fucking sucks though, plot happens and now the final area is a giant maze with towns at each opposite side and up to 5 floors with corridors and enemies and you can't really go anywhere else at that point, so depending on your alignment you'll have to fight through 5 to 10 floors to reach the end, which feels almost like a chore.

[theokusgallery]

Trashing that in your askbox or something *disappears in the wild*

(I know you've already seen it but idk funny)

Fun fact if you call Arsenic (normal version) babygirl he will fucking kill you

[klausbens]

i think laura and ryan would've had their own power duo dynamic like dylan and kaitlyn if they'd gotten to spend the summer together. not that they don't have it in game, but i think they could have developed a very profound friendship and i like fantasizing about it. also max and dylan would probably had gotten along super well. kinda really want to write something on this

[jeff-from-marketing]

So Baldur's Gate 3 has now fully released, and it kinda fucks?

Okay more than kinda, Baldur's Gate 3 should be the new standard for larger studios in terms of quality and, more importantly, how they treat players. I can't believe I'm saying that about a D&D game.

So for context to that last bit: I'm super fucking jaded on D&D. I've pretty much jumped ship entirely to any other TTRPG (namely Pathfinder 2e) because I hate how Wizards of the Coast have handled D&D 5e and how they treat their customers.

I fucking love Baldur's Gate 3. It's still got some of the D&D things I'm not overly fond of, but that's a personal taste thing, and overall this game fucking rules. Larian is really out here just making D&D a more fun experience than the actual Wizards of the Coast, it's honestly kinda wild.

But more than just in the context of "a D&D game" I want to talk about Baldur's Gate 3 in the larger scope of videogames as a whole, primarily in the triple A scene. There's a reason Baldur's Gate 3 is doing so well and why it's very quickly become so beloved, and it's not just because of the bear sex. That reason can be largely boiled down to "Larian respects their playerbase, and more importantly respects their money." Too often we're seeing games from big triple A companies that already have way too much fucking money just being absolutely filled beyond the brim with monetisation for something that's likely already $90-100 AUD. Or worse: games that borderline lie to you about how much they cost, Destiny 2 I'm fucking looking at you and your "genuinely the worst monetisation I have seen in a game." Or just straight up gacha games that are purpose built to fuck you out of your money and use similar tricks that the gambling industry uses to make money.

But Baldur's Gate 3? Pay the full price up front, and you get a full game. There's no hidden "gotcha!" monetisation, no battlepasses, no rotating digital storefront, no fake "premium" currency, no "but it's only cosmetic" microtransactions. I'm not even gonna gripe against their pre-order stuff like I normally would, because you could actually play the game before it was released. Baldur's Gate 3 was in Early Access for literal years before it fully released, and it used that time quite well! It's fascinating seeing where it came from and how much has changed since then. But more importantly: if you "pre-ordered" the game (read: buy it in Early Access) you could still play the game, you still immediately got something for your money. If you didn't like it, you could still refund it if you wanted to. As a nice little bonus: the game mostly just works! It's not perfect, there's some little oddities here and there, but I haven't had the game break yet. But then again, I'm one of the people who somehow managed to have a pretty bug-free Cyberpunk 2077 experience at launch, so who knows.

And plus it comes with couch co-op! Why is that so rare these days?? It feels like the only games you can really sit down with and play with friends these days are party games.

Of course, Baldur's Gate 3 isn't truly alone here. Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West have come out as full games with no monetisation BS and working fine, albeit stuck to PlayStation for a long time before releasing elsewhere (although BG3 is currently PC exclusive, though that should change next month). God of War, while I've not personally played, I haven't heard anything egregious about it. Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is such a fun time, but at $125 AUD it's a hard sell, even knowing all the work that went into it (Though that did drop to just $95 AUD on PC). I'm even going to give Cyberpunk 2077 an honourable mention, because if you had a computer that could run it at launch it was still a damn good time. Though that one unfortunately came at the cost of "should never have been released on last gen consoles" and "worker abuse through crunch."

But all of those examples have the "pre-order to maybe get something" issue that Baldur's Gate 3 avoided through its Early Access launch. You also can't really share those games with friends. You can maybe let a friend borrow the game and then talk about it after you've both finished it in your own time, but that's kinda like watching a movie separately and then talking about it. It's just not the same. That's not even mentioning how small that list is. I'd say it's just single player games, but both Bethesda and Ubisoft have shown even they're not safe.

I haven't seen any game from a large studio respect the player as much as I have with Larian and Baldur's Gate 3. I definitely don't feel bad paying full price for this one. Once they're wrapped up with BG3, I don't suppose I could bribe them to make a Pathfinder game? Pretty please? Already like halfway there with Divinity: Original Sin 2!

[that0nebird]

I keep seeing people say twdg needs to be adapted to tv and I feel like that wouldn't be a good decision at all like telltale games in general wouldn't work if you tried adapting them to tv because your choices throughout them make a big enough difference to where there really is no "lore accurate" way to tell that story without putting off a lot of fans except the few who chose the specific storyline they follow.

[electricpurrs]

do you think if i went to college id have the opportunity to hang out with friends and kiss cute boys. is this where im gonna need to find the motivation to go to college

[jemandrr]

accidentally browsing a (very niche) female-dominated gaming space and seeing people TEAR into people who want an option to change the player character's pronouns to he/him or they/them without changing anything else because it'd invite men to invade a safe space. For a game purely about dating men. Like, I've been through plenty of female-dominated spaces where queer people and similar-interest straight men are welcome (in this case it'd be bi men but yknow), so it's just this one community, but jeez. The amount of fear that anyone who isn't explicitly a femme female would come in and A. hit on the faceless women there or B. taint the game by making the devs add designs of men who they don't want to date?

I got such a strong terf-y rhetoric from that community, like we can't have anything in common with people who aren't like us going on. All about taking 'our' things. And a lot of people contradicting one other but not trying to find out what the truth is because they have the same conclusion. Like two people saying A>B or B>A and no argument arises and no one shows interest in which is true because both people conclude C.

A lot of people even saying that, likewise, things that appeal to female or queer audiences should NOT be added to mainstream media just like queer content should not be added to female-oriented media. These hard walls around what belongs to who is like...they were raised by toy companies or something.

Like what is (paraphrasing so it isnt searchble) "I would never come into a male dominated community because I feel like I would be invading their safe space, so I don't get why men would want to come here and talk about liking men." At least the people who are scared of sexual abuse are warranted, I've seen tons of abusive language towards people they think are women in male dominated online spaces, but what is this fear of even...sharing interests with men? I know we've been in a new era of gender role enforcement with the tradfem movement, but jeez. And as for these last two points, they both are ones that were contradicted. People also said they do believe in diversity BUT just *this* shouldn't count.

Some people even said it's not fair that they get pushed to be more inclusive when mainstream media never does. Which makes me wonder if they're so deep in their niche 'I only experience content made by and for exclusively straight women' content that they haven't noticed any of the movements in media going on over the last 1.5 decades. Like it's true that we haven't made that much progress, but how do they think that no media gets pressed to increase diversity? The more rigid/right-leaning male audiences of tons of media have been complaining about forced diversity for years in exactly the same way (and sometimes, when it really WAS forced diversity, everyone complains because it's not representing anyone really but yknow). But I guess they wouldn't know that if all of them avoid mainstream media?

Also...what is the fear that gay men like men in a 'wrong' way...(and again, the unargued contradiction being plenty of people saying that they also like media about gay characters, but just they shouldn't make these characters gay)

And like I do get it, in the sense that being marginalized makes you skeptical and fearful of things you don't understand in its own separate way from how being in a privileged class makes you skeptical and fearful of things you don't understand. There's a lot more fear of exploring things different and new because the possible retribution feels/has been higher.

Honestly, this post isn't actually about a couple hundred to low-thousand women in a small community for niche games. Not like, I think it's important, I want to actively make them change. It's not that big a deal, not that surprising in the grand scheme. It's similar rhetoric to things i've seen before (Tradfem/terf). I've seen screenshots of, like, facebook mom groups before. And I've seen way bigger communities be way more open and welcoming, it's just a little outlier.

I'm just writing this because I'm a bit shellshocked because I forget how much that those kinds of people are not just the older, tech-illiterate generations, and not just shallow influencers who will say anything for the clicks (or because someone behind the scenes is funding it), their views behind the camera up in the air. Like I think I cultivate the people I interact with a bit too well. Too many of the people I actually interact with or witness the thoughts of regularly are queer and have flitting relationships with gender and then I remember the other side of the coin has people who think they're being progressive by suggesting that everyone who is different be segregated and therefore safe from each other with no room for intersectionality.

[elite-kawaii]

An interesting fact . . .

. . . about some gamers is: If they have to spend days doing a single thing on a game in order to finish it, eventually they will loose all interest in the game completely, basically it becomes boring and they wont want to play or bother with it any.

Im never going to get passed the stupid King Koco Trial in Sonic Frontiers! Was playing it almost everyday. Then I got to that freaking trial! Over and over and over just battling the same three bosses! Over and over and over looking up tips to beat them! Over and over and over hours and hours and hours a day just running out of rings and failing the trail! No matter what I tried, what tricks I used, my only reward getting told that I was a failure over and over and over! Yeah thats real fun Sega, I love getting told I still suck at playing my fave game franchise! Thanks for that!

Heck I even tried looking up ways to cheat at the stupid game! Which is something I never do! I got nothing! It got boring after a while and slowly I just stopped trying! Im just "not allowed" to see what the fuss was about that blue eyed Super Form or that one weird still shot I kept seeing of Sonic seemingly covered in digital corruption with his eyes looking weird and actually showing his fangs!

"Oh just look it up on YouTube then!" Google took control of my laptop and made it so I cant, so I cant even look the stupid game up there a watch it! I don't know why every single game has to be super Dark Souls hard nowadays and I have had it set to easy for most weeks now! I cant even get the island map fully opened in the last update. Maybe opening it up fully before starting the update would have helped with that, but knowing games now probably not.

Oh and I just love how they reset Sonic so he all the way back to level 1 again for this trail! Yeah because that really helps! I just love how they made all the leveling I did just a waste of time from my point of view! You know other games level the baddies with the player char, why couldn't that have been a thing here?! Oh wait the people who wanted a hard game wouldn't have liked that? Then they can either set it on hard mode or go find another freaking game then! You don't need to make a perfectly fine game super hard just because some players found it to easy or just add harder modes to it! There you go difficulty curve problem solved!

If theres any easy to do glitches that would help lay them on me I dont really care about playing the game fairly anymore, just finding out what happens would be nice, but if none come oh well. Though I know I just ranted about it, I don't much care about the game anymore, just saying I wouldn't mind finding out what happened though.

[kamuro-junrenka]

Just finished gaiden. My heart is broken

[devotedlystrangewizard]

dont know what it is about june that makes me hyperfixate on things so badly but happy pride month i am ultrakill now

[ygdrasilly]

after spending every day since sunday night subsisting only on watermelon, grapes, apples, and the occasional tin of tuna bc of the disaster that was sunday night (ie, when i was kept awake all night throwing up and got launched into a high temperature thanks to either a virus or subway giving me an allergic reaction), i can now proudly say ive finally eaten something

not much. just a small margherita pizza (from one of my local places ofc) but it's something. at least leo cat is happy with me putting bungou stray dogs on the funi xbox app to watch

[pinneaplojuice]

Hello hi again I'm alive and not dead.

I've kept playing xenoblade and I've actually beaten it! It's pretty cool! Good 120-something hours game!

I've been trying to draw stuff recently because I have to draw a thing for my sibling since they'll be moving out soon and want something made by me to have in their apartment (problem is, I have drawn literally absolutely nothing in the past 3 months so I'm extremely rusty and I have no idea what to actually draw)

Anyways, while making doodles I accidentally drew riki from xenoblade so I figured I would post him here since I haven't posted an actual drawing in an ass-long time

[jeff-from-marketing]

I just want to use this as an opportunity to tell people that Metal: Hellsinger exists, and it fucks.

For the uninitiated, it's a rhythm based first person shooter. Which, admittedly, does sound like a rather strange genre combo at first. But holy shit it works. Heck, people already praise games like Doom for their soundtrack, and a well made shooter already has its own form of internal rhythm to it, so why not just crank it up to 11?

A well made Rhythm game is already suited to putting you in a sort of "zen" mode, where you're not strictly thinking about what's going on, but you sure as hell are riding that wave to its full extent. Combine that with a soundtrack that really just is a love letter to all things metal, and some hells to shoot demons in, and you've got a recipe for a very fun time. Getting into the perfect rhythm with the pistols (or your own weapon of choice really) and just laying waste to all in your way all while the music gets more and more intense the more you slay is a truly wonderful experience.

There's really not much else like it either. There's BPM: Bullets Per Minute, and that is still a lot of fun, but IMO Metal: Hellsinger takes it to a new level. But outside those two games, there's really not much like it, and that helps make Hellsinger truly something special.

I only have two complaints with Metal: Hellsinger.

I need more. The campaign is fairly short, and I want more levels. It's not unsatisfyingly short though, it's like Titanfall 2 in that regard.

I need to buy the soundtrack officially. It well and truly is a love letter to all things metal (honestly the whole game is, it's great) and it has a lot of my favourite artists on there, and I need to inject it my soul. It is criminal that this is only available unofficially through other people uploading it.

Unrelated sidenote: I blame this game entirely for the voice I use with one of my Pathfinder characters. The narrator has a very infectious voice.

[carly404error]

Tell me things to rant about i’ve ran out of ideas (options are dsmp, cuphead, the casino cups au, batim or videogames in general)

[decepticon-nerd]

Ok, having been a FNaF fan for years and years and never having actually played them, I was not scared of them before.

I recently bought the Nintendo Switch ported versions because they were on sale and I got gift cards for Christmas .

FNaF 1: I get anxious a bit because I don't know how to stop Freddy, and I probably overcheck Foxy. I'm not scared when I die because I know what cues I have to my fate

FNaF 2: I'm too intimidated by the number of bots to even try

FNaF 3: Fucking terrifying. I could not find the bastard. Fuck Springtrap and his sneaky gut ankle self, I almost died on night TWO because I couldn't FIND HIM in ANY CAMERA INCLUDING THE VENTS

FNaF 4: No idea, haven't touched it, and my ears are shit so I might miss sound cues and die

[twobellsilence]

Bro why are Spaniards so BAD at dubbing stuff. Like legitimately 95% of their dubs are laughable at best and it's kind of concerning