Lurker > the_rowan

Hulk Davidson always made me feel so strange fighting him. The best way to fight him is to have him use exactly the same one attack several times until he charges, then you use exactly the same one attack, loop until dead. There's all these other things he can do, but it's terrible if he does any of them. It's like, oh cool, you can break his axe, surely that's good? Nope, terrible. Any movement that makes him use other attacks is terrible. Do the one thing and only that. Another Joe sort of has the same problem, though it makes more thematic sense that "Do not get distracted or do anything but beeline for the real boss and hit him" is the strategy in a fight where the enemy makes duplicates.

King Blue is the opposite, where I want to do a consistent strategy that keeps him under control and doesn't have to deal with any random lightning bullshit, but the execution is pretty precise to actually keep him in the attack loop you want.

I wish I remembered the bosses from VJ2 better. I don't remember them being bad, just that game never sticks in my memory when I replay it for some reason.

Capitalism works on a smaller scale. It's the formation of megacorporations that control their own regulation, as well as Wall Street creating incentives for rampant, unsustainable growth and short-term gains while punishing companies that try to act responsibly and minimize the externalities they create, that have ruined capitalism.

Capitalism ultimately needs people to have options to work well. It is based around the idea that individual needs and situations are unique, and the people in those situations are better fit to choose what to create, sell, or purchase than a government that must act with large motions. The government's role is then to establish rules the make companies assume responsibility for their externalities, because without those regulations, the only reason for a company to assume responsibility for those costs is good faith. We have literally the opposite instead, where not only are regulations insufficient, but we have established a mandate for public companies to actively seek to throw their costs at the public while bringing in as much profit as possible, and to spend that profit on growth of the company for more profit, rather than enrichment of its workers, home city, or environment.

I don't think anyone has found an economic system yet that deals well with the existence of a global economy, or the rapid pace of change in the modern world. Any national system is inherently glacially slow and inflexible when it comes to change and adaptation, even when it isn't corrupt. Any private one is inherently going to serve the interest of individuals rather than society.

I wouldn't worry about it that much. Depending on the version of the game you're playing, there's ways to make some of your characters virtually invincible. (The final boss does still have Hyperdriver, which gets through basically everything, but for the most part you can become virtually impossible to kill.) There's also all sorts of broken shit with Gau and his rages that inflict status effects that don't have any possible immunity (for lategame) or just getting access to Stop early which breaks a lot of the early/midgame. Fixed Dice, Joker Doom RNG rigging, the Vanish status making magic bypass status immunities... there's just so many ways to absolutely break the game in half in FFVI that don't even involve stats or levels.

It's a VERY large increase to your damage, for magic at least. Like the difference between a level 30 Terra with her base magic and with 15 +2 magic levelups is going to be around 60-80% more spell damage. (The basic calculation for the scaling portion of magic damage is (Level * Magic Power * Spell Power / 32)). The scaling on Vigor is absolutely shit at normally achievably levels, though and can basically be ignored: ((Level * Level * Attack) / 256) * 3 / 2, where Attack goes up by 2 for every point of Vigor. A point of Vigor is worth about 1 more damage at level 10, about 4 damage at level 20, scaling with level^2.

Almost all the good attacks in FFVI are magic btw, including most Blitzes. Earrings on Sabin are immensely powerful early.

dameon_reaper posted...

Wait, really? Then why have I been getting higher level characters? Gau was lvl 21 when I recruited him.

Character join levels are based on average party level in FFVI.

Let's just say that the harder part of beating the game on the minimum possible levels is trying not to accidentally gain levels, not beating the fights.

Lin wasn't bad lol. She gives a ton of stats and basically functions like Tabitha but better when the map isn't tiny, since suiciding units on her feeds her meter unlike Tabitha. She's a top 5 CO in the game, probably.

Viewtiful Joe
Anything in the Touhou-verse
Rabi-Ribi
Death's Door
Griftlands (mostly--there's a couple fights that are against monsters.)
Banjo-Tooie (which sort of plays with this trope in that it will give a balloon or welding torch a personality just so it can talk while it fights you)

GrandConjuraton posted...

Very rural areas like mine wouldn't have anywhere to shop at all without Walmart. Outside of grocery stores, literally nothing else is here.

For a lot of these areas, there used to be other places to shop, until Walmart showed up and ran them out of business.

ANort175 posted...

A bunch of money and you get to solve world hunger? Sounds like a win-win

I think there's got to be a downside when you start violating conservation of mass/energy. But yeah, this is the kind of outside-the-box thinking that wins.

Antifar posted...

I remember playing most of the first game with Max (partly because I was too stupid to bother with indirect units).

I mean, you identified a broken CO and used him. AW1 Max was disgusting and way better than your other options in the campaign.

Of the broken COs in AWDS, I've used Colin the most, I think, followed by Sensei. Of the balanced, not sure... might be Eagle or Jess. In DoR, I split my playtime pretty evenly between all of the Brenner's Wolves COs--Isabella is OP, but the other three are really good. (Tabitha is the only non-Wolves CO in the game that's any good--too many overspecialized or weak abilities in the other armies. Maybe Gage too, but his early game can be rough. Jake might also be OP as well because of 4 mov mechs.)

guffguy89 posted...

so he wouldn't have been able to fly the ship, correct?

Pretty sure he could fly the ship, and the ship isn't even required anyway, just a little bit faster than going shipless. (The spacesuit inside the ship is still required, of course.) But he couldn't beat the game because the very next thing he does isn't possible until a certain amount of time has passed.

Huh, not sure how they're able to sleep without two deaths first. The improved ship movement by angling to use multiple sets of thrusters to push the ship in the correct direction is smart, though. (Is there a reason they can't use all three sets? Too hard to aim the ship?)

I love reading about how the geyser at the start only works exactly 31 seconds from loading the universe, because otherwise the gravity from the other planets in the solar system affects your trajectory enough to make the fall lethal. (It's literally such a miniscule difference from fatal that you have to land on the very, very slightly higher outer edge of the launch pad or you die even with the correct gravity.)

Wait, he got into the ship without getting the launch codes, could he have launched the ship itself if he wanted to?

Nothing in the universe that is time-based "turns on" until you get the cutscene as you're leaving the observatory after getting the codes. (Which actually plays while standing next to the ship in this speedrun, but it still plays.) It still runs the physics simulation, but there's one thing in the run that can't be done until a certain time.

Speed runs aren't really the same because they know all the information initally. I'm talking about ways that a player can go into the game blind and find all the information they need to solve all the puzzles and located all the locations required to get the end of the game. There are a lot of areas and pieces of information in the game that don't actually lead towards the end of the game at all, so they could be considered optional, even if we consider it mandatory to learn the solution to a puzzle before enacting that solution.

It's been a long time since we had a new Final Fantasy numbered title that wasn't deeply flawed at launch. Even FFXIV had to have a complete reworking. I'm hyped for FFXVI and all, but it's the sort of game where I want to see positive impressions from people who have played longer than a few days before I consider buying it, while TotK is a game I could go into and feel I'm very likely to have a good experience without having to see any more.

There are surprisingly many purely optional things in Outer Wilds that basically offer zero useful clues towards the endgame puzzles and instead just flesh out the story or give you ideas around the general goal of the game. At the most, they might just tell you to check another spot for information, but you could easily run into that other spot first. (i.e. "Nomai X wrote about how to do so-and-so in this location" but you could just find a sign for that location on another planet and follow the path on your own.

Sun Station
Quantum Moon and the three Quantum locations that teach its rules
Pretty much everything on Timber Hearth (you can shoot your scout into the seed, but you can also just find Feldspar with your signalscope while on Dark Bramble which makes this completely unnecessary)
The Attlerock
The Interloper
The High Energy Lab (sort of, it's a more direct reinforcement of information you could already learn at e.g. White Hole Station)
All locations above the water on Giant's Deep
The Orbital Probe Cannon, sort of (if you happen to just feel you should check out the Deep core when you learn how to)
Hollow's Lantern (probably easiest location to miss in the game)
Everything with the other travelers other than Feldspar's jellyfish hint

Consider that you only need to learn a few things to finish the game:
How to get below the current on Giant's Deep
How to get into Giant's Deep core
How to reach the center of Ash Twin
How to survive Anglerfish
How to locate the Vessel (but this is entirely self-contained in Dark Bramble other than getting the escape pod signal)

So yeah, there are a surprising amount of things you can just outright miss in a playthrough. Especially if you end up solving certain puzzles accidentally or with more "brute force" methods, which is more possible with some of these than others. That said, absolutely no one who has played this game to the end without looking up all the solutions or otherwise ruining it for themselves has ever felt like they didn't want to fill in the logbook and explore everything, from what I've seen.

Scintillant posted...

Black people only counted as 3/5ths of a person but that had nothing to do with racism

That actually didn't. That was just so Southern states didn't get even more representatives in Congress (who would only represent white people regardless). Slave states wanted this number to be 1, so 3/5ths was the compromise. It was also 3/5th per slave, not per black person; free black people still counted as one person.

AdrianBeterson posted...

I loved it. I enjoyed the gameplay, boss fights, puzzles and the story. I didnt think pacing was an issue either. On the other hand, I also dont play video games that much anymore, so maybe the game was targeted more towards casual gamers like myself?

I mean, I loved all these things in GoW: Ragnarok and I play games all the time, always on the hardest difficulty, play competitive Starcraft/Splatoon, speedrun Metroid games at a high level, play tons of JRPGs and puzzle games (not basic falling block ones, stuff like Baba is You, The Witness, The Talos Principle), do not play any MMORPGs and generally do not like Western-style RPGs much. I'd say I'm pretty far from a "casual gamer".

My only real issue with Ragnarok was that traversing areas I'd already been through was kind of slow, and the loading times were really long on PS4. Other than that, it was fun the whole way through.

I had a great time with it. I played on GMGoW difficulty and never acquired revival stones so fights would often take multiple attempts and felt pretty satisfying to get through. Had a good time 100%-ing the game.

I can see getting bored with the gameplay if fights are easy, though.

All the content from the original is in deluxe, but some of it is slightly modified. It's not different enough between the two versions to warrant a separate purchase, though.

AmericaTheBrave posted...

If you're so deep in the boob hole, you start noticing pokemon tits, you might have a problem.

You don't see this behavior in ass men.

https://youtu.be/BZhdpuH5wKo

I'm probably way too late for people to see it now, but if the numbers I read were right, the cows lost here were about 0.1% of cows in the state of Texas, and about 2.8% of its dairy cows. It's about 0.19% of the dairy cows in the whole US. I really don't see it having an noteworthy impact on dairy prices with how much dairy goes to waste.

Ganondorf has joined the "everyone is hot now" club that Breath of the Wild started.
We didn't get a good look at them, but I wonder if that lizard person will be in the same boat as well.

Yeah, be careful with the DLC and asking advice. There are SO MANY instances I've seen where people will tell you to "try this thing that you are absolutely not supposed to know to do following the logical progression" as your hint to progress.

My main advice for it is to be observant and make sure you examine everything carefully, try to avoid brute forcing things if you have no clue about the answer and instead really think about cause and effect or look elsewhere for more options/information, and if something seems really challenging compared to the rest of the game, there could be an easier way to do it.

guffguy89 posted...

To answer your question without giving away any story spoilers: You probably noticed by now that as the ash planet loses sand, a group of buildings connected by a bridge slowly appears. Each of those buildings have a teleportation stand that allows you to teleport to a different location. The mechanics of teleportation in the game involve standing on the special teleportation flooring tiles and then looking up. When the planet you are supposed to teleport to intersects with the crosshairs, then you teleport to that location.

Slightly more detailed spoilers on how to get to center of ash twin if you need the help: For ash twin, this is a little difficult because you don't want to get sucked up by the sandstorm, but that's exactly when the planet crosses the teleportation point. You'll want to find some nearby cover and time your jump on the teleportation platform at just the right moment. Dont forget to look up.

Just to be clear, looking up has literally nothing to do with how these things work and is not necessary.

Heartomaton posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/1/6/8/AAcI8BAAEYUI.jpg

Appropriately, the image contains furries, since the only thing faster than rule 34 artists are furry rule 34 artists.

The Legend of Zelda: Protecc the Tulin edition

We continue to see huge breakthroughs in cancer diagnosis and treatment on a yearly basis. I have no idea what you guys are even talking about. "Cancer" is not a single disease, though.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


It's better at getting irregular shapes and automatically puts your selection on the clipboard for pasting. Also about one click faster for most steps, and the editor, should you choose to open it, is much better and allows undos.

Trickfinger posted...

Nope. It's just straight up more fun than any of these other forums.

If you're in the mood for porn, I guess that's probably the case. If you think discussion on Twitter is worthwhile, well...

because the dumbest people on earth can feel like they're being listened to

I sure love having random assholes pop into threads to spew completely uneducated nonsense, self-promote, or make complete non-statements of agreement to farm likes (possibly because they're bots, possibly because they're narcissists).

I fucking hate this planet and every dumbass human on it. One guy who is tangentially connected to the movie was upset with a small complaint. But because people are too fucking dumb to not click through on every clickbait title they see, this is now an "all liberals" vs "all conservatives" issue based on putting clickbait sites/videos and random tweets in reaction to said sites against each other.

I would be willing to bet that an astronomically small number of people on either side actually cared about how "woke" the movie was until some awful media outlets decided to make stories out of a couple individual's random Tweets as if they expressed the views of hundreds of millions of people, and now they still don't give a shit about how woke the movie is, just the other sides' supposed opinion of it.

You can't actually do that on Reddit. At least not the parts of Reddit that your average person is going to see on r/popular or whatever they're casually checking.

Twitter is successful in spite of being an absolute shithole that no one actually likes, because the dumbest people on earth can feel like they're being listened to thanks to bots, not because of the ability to throw insults around.

Solid_Seb posted...

Quick mathing shows approximately 10 days difference of waking hours, assuming the person is 30 years old. So would I give up an extra 21 years of life for a difference of 10 days worth of less sleep? Being old sucks but I think I would take it over death.

lmk if my numbers aren't right tho

The math is that you lose 2 hours per day until you turn 70, then gain 16 hours a day for 21 years. It's not anywhere near as bad as only gaining 10 days before 70, but it's still absolutely awful. Even if you start at birth, you only gain 5.83 years before you lose 14.

puppy posted...

Because they are the only media that is counter to NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Reuters, Yahoo, Google News, NYT, etc.

To not see how left leaning our media is means they've done a great job convincing people they aren't. It's pretty evident. Like, every media stream goes after Fox News media, meaning that they are countering them, aka Left countering Right.

Fox News (the show) is literally not even legally allowed to call itself news anymore because it is complete and total steaming bullshit and has lost lawsuits for being complete and total steaming bullshit.

You can't compare any actual news to an "entertainment" (stochastic terrorist propaganda) network.

Like Fox News is not even a "biased" network. Bias is reporting stories that actually happened, but in a way that leads to a certain interpretation. Fox News literally just fabricates their stories, then reports on the public reaction to those fake stories.

whateveroh posted...

But prescribing them bullshit they don't need is.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, clearly.
The pharmaceutical industry has no authority to prescribe anything. And doctors don't prescribe medications people don't need, except in a few circumstances: The patient misrepresents their symptoms; the doctor cannot tell for certain if the patient needs a medication, but the harm done by not using it if needed is greater than the harm done by using it if not needed (such as preventative medicine or antibiotics to ward off potential infection); or the doctor is getting a kickback for prescribing, which is rare, illegal, and taken extremely seriously by the DEA.

BurmesePenguin posted...

The lrvel scaling does nothing to outweight your increased power level aside from chapter one. Its definitely not required to break Trishs AI, though its so simple to do I did it by accident in my first NG+

On NG++, unless you preequipped Roland with the Vanguard Scarf (I think that's the name, makes you go first), Trish one-shots Roland as the first action of battle, then proceeds to one-shot Geela and Frederica as soon as she can get in range with nothing you can really do about it.

And I very, very much doubt you beat this on NG+ Hard without breaking the AI. It takes several turns to kill either boss, and everything on the map two-shots most of your characters, plus one member of your party is guaranteed to be severely underleveled.

BurmesePenguin posted...

It's honestly really good, but it's deeply flawed in that it encourages multiple playthroughs without scaling the difficulty to make it engaging to do so. Because of the nature of the uh... conviction?... system it has if you want a specific character tied to conviction score and you aren't doing multiple playthroughs on the same file you have to play with a guide next to you, which is undesirable.

Haven't played FFT and TO, so can't compare.

It does scale the difficulty until enemies hit the level cap in NG++, though. Actually, the scaling is so extreme that the first chapter becomes literally impossible on Hard unless you break the AI so one of the bosses does nothing.

I thought it was an incredibly good tactics game. Zero grinding required (beat Hard without touching mock battles), great character role diversity, and the relative lack of role overlap means you're constantly thinking about how characters can set up each other or which are best on the current map. Story is a really nice breath of fresh air with how it's almost purely a political struggle, and you're not some kid that's somehow entitled to shape the world, just the heir of a military family who needs to make decisions to get by as the world shakes around him. The golden end does change that up a bit, for better or for worse, though.

GranTurismo posted...

In history, though?, no question , dinosaurs. Any of you disagree with this? evolution's greatest creation

We already said birds, AKA all living dinosaurs.

Prestoff posted...

I saw the game on sale at a local game shop and I was thinking of getting it, but I'm surprised by all the negativitiy in this topic. I enjoy Platinum games for their gameplay, but I will admit the stories associated with many of them tend to be garbage.

It's not a bad game. It just has a lot of aspects to it other than action, some of which are not all that friendly on replays, and a lot of the game takes place in the Astral Plane, which could largely be described as "red and digital-looking" the whole way through. If you don't mind a bit of exploring and talking to people to play detective, or some minigames, you can still have fun with these parts.

The combat is also pretty experimental and unusual; your character is pretty weak and is more of a puppet master who dances to activate the real moves on your legions than an actual combatant, when you're not just directly controlling the legion itself. If you've played Bayonetta 3, it's like how Wink Slave and Demon Slave did most of your damage (as these moves are literally copied from Astral Chain in how they function), but you also have cooldown-based skills that you can activate to make your legions start attacking or assisting on their own, similar to the X button morphs in Wonderful 101. Dodging with the dodge button is also extremely weird and pretty terrible (you are not Bayonetta here); you really have to focus on controlling enemies with binds and skills or avoiding attacks entirely until you unlock the Perfect Call skill for your legions, which is a ridiculously strong and useful parry that only functions when you do not have your legion summoned.

I maintain that the ranking system is hot trash in this game, which really kills replay value a fair bit, but the game still maintained my interest to the end and was decently fun.

100%'d both games multiple times. Also 100%'d SM64DS and Banjo-Tooie.

Choco posted...

nah some of them are creepy

Fine, neoaves, then. The only birds I can think of with bad reps in there are vultures (mostly because of looks; scavengers don't at all deserve a bad rep for any other reason). You have all the most intelligent and beautiful species in there, including the corvids which have several members that are arguably smarter than any non-human ape, as well as your inspiring and powerful birds of prey.

See, stuff like guro is creepy, but it's just images. To my knowledge, that fetish does not extend into real life at all. Same with lolicon and most of the more extreme furry stuff (with the stuff that does extend to real life being done with humans, not animals). Stuff like infantilism extends to real life, to the point people choose to live significant portions everyday lives as if they are completely, totally dependent on other people to take care of them, not functioning in society at all.

It's got a lot of weird things, yeah. Like how consumable items don't detract from your score and are insanely busted, or how you can get absolutely mauled in combat but still get the max rank as long as you go down a checklist of "things to do each combat" which get pretty boring to repeat out of obligation every fight.

On the other hand, once you actually get through those skill trees and have stuff like the summon parry ability and two good skills on each legion, and you're used to the movesets, synch attacks, and controlling your legion in general, it can be a lot of fun.

Except you have to spend a lot of time not fighting during replays, and the environments kind of suck, and these other weird problems.

Bayonetta 3 took very heavy inspiration from the best parts of this game's combat with the Demon Slave mechanic, and it works very well there IMO, although that game has its own issues with absolutely trash enemy design from the beginning to the end.

IMO Viewtiful Joe and Wonderful 101 remain the only fun Platinum games to replay for rankings, even if they suffer from not having a proper way to quickly retry a section. "Don't get hit, unless you Ukemi it", "Kill fast", and "Get a good score" (which prevents stuff like pure Voomerang/gun stinger cheese) feel a lot more satisfying to accomplish than "Do the same things at least once every fight".

Infantilism is really up there.

You guys saying scat don't have anything on grown men soiling their diapers so their daddies or mommies can change them.

Monk is almost always an early-game powerhouse that has no lasting power into lategame. Don't think it's all that cool, though.

Summoner is usually the opposite, generally being weak early and an absolute monster late.

Another trope is the "mix two items" classes/abilities which are almost always broken as all hell.

BurmesePenguin posted...

When you get to him you unlock a boss rush mode of the three bosses you encounter up to that point, so you just have to beat the first two to get to him. That's what I did after getting slaughtered the first time.

I don't think that existed when I played. Interesting.