I would suggest 'Varrok Forums' or something about polish sausage.
I finished Dangan Ronpa Trigger Happy Havoc last week. I played it pretty much nonstop so I didn't have time to post about my first impressions. It's a linear visual novel, not my usual thing, but 'linear' doesn't describe the story at all. It's about a high school for 'Ultimate' students who exhibit examplary qualities, so it's pretty intensely japanese. There's the Ultimate Baseball star, the Ultimate Idol, the Ultimate...Moral Compass. Then they get weird; there's the Ultimate Fanfic Writer, The Ultimate Biker Gang Leader and your protagonist, 'The Ultimate Lucky Student' who was chosen to go the school out of some kind of raffle.
Anyway, the game kicked all of my 'anime game' expectations right in the crotch, I think I can explain how pretty clearly, but this is also a spoiler so if you've been interested in Dangan Ronpa don't read this, it will spoil the tone.
So you're locked in this school with all these other kids and told whoever can commit a murder and go through a courtroom-style trial without being figured out 'graduates' and gets to escape the confines of the school. In order the motivate this the antagonist Monokuma, a robotic teddy bear used as an avatar by the mastermind, reveals something terrible has happened to the outside world and presses the kids to kill to escape and find out what happened. The protagonist makes fast friends with who else but The Ultimate Idol, Sayaka. Everything hints at this being some kind of romantic thing that will build across the game, but she gets killed in the first Chapter. How does she get killed? She tries to frame the protagonist for the murder of another student by sweet talking him into switching rooms, inviting that student to the protags room and then gets overpowered and stabbed.
It totally warped my expectations. The rest of the game is similar, gradually more and more complex murders happen as the kids get desperate and at the end of the game the survivors are basically the last ones you expected to make it through. It's a really good game and I recommend anyone with a Vita to look into it. I'm not big into Visual Novels as a result, but I'd definitely follow this series to see where it goes. Here's the conclusion of the first trial:
(Minor spoiler, but you know who is guilty the second you see the first crime scene anyway)
It's very intense, and I got hooked almost instantly.
Well, I've been playing more things than just anime sims about murdering teenagers. I've been playing Super Meat Boy!
I love Meat Boy because I look like him. I looked like him before he was even released, and I still look like him. I could shave my head, paint it red, cover my nose and dangle some bevelled rectangles from my ears and chin and look like headmasters Meat Boy.
I also love Super Meat Boy's music, very much so. It's just great, diverse music. It's good for driving, it's good for working on projects and most importantly it's good for Super Meat Boy.
They released SMB on the Playstation store this month, free for PSPlus subscribers along with the surprisingly enchanting Broken Age and some shitty, otherwise overpriced indie games. You could imagine my delight in finding out I could play one of my favorite games again, on a portable and for free, no less. It's a small download, so I spent a few minutes debating about whether my fingers were worth smelling and then booted it up.
'Wow, it looks great! Just as good as it did on my Xbox half a decade ago! But wait! Something's wrong...something's...different...'
They changed the music. They couldn't get the rights to the original soundtrack, so they got some people to rerecord it. Most of these redubs are underwhelming, sounding more like noise than music. Luckily Scattle (the guy who did the whoop-de-doop song from Hotline Miami, you know the one) covered The Hospital and another world, so not every meaty realm has been corrupted.
Some of this music though, sheesh. I remember Forest Funk. I remember it very clearly, I can hear it at will. I listened to a lot of the Meat Boy OST, and Forest Funk was this uniformly appropriate song. Now it sounds like something from Banjo Kazooie. It sounds like Yosemite Sam sca-doodlin' on a banjo with his great red moustache on bongos. I hate this new, different music and I wish there was some way I could pay just to have it in the game anyway. Release it as DLC with some fresh new licensing, for example.
Broken Age is okay. Oftentimes it's like watching a really original, cleverly written cartoon which is extremely cozy. There are missing pieces, though. Little bits and bobs feel incomplete, but the overall product is very nice.
Most importantly, and pay attention because this applies to all of you and not just me, Megaman Legends is finally on the PS store. Megaman Legends is a great game, and there are few like it. It introduced me to 3D games. Back when people were crapping their pants about Master Chief and Mario now having real-tme moisture graphics, I was playing Megaman Legends. It's like an RPG mixed with a dungeon crawler with some Zelda/Conker/SM64/DK64 etc... thrown in. I love me some Megaman.
It's aged alright, a lot easier than I remember. The Clozer woods boss (a trio of robot dogs) were particularly underwhelming, but everything about it retained that charm. I maintain that there is not and will never be anything quite as lovingly crafted as Megaman Legends in the realm of gaming. It's absolutely sublime, anime bullshit and all.
Id love to play Meat boy for the first time, however a good 'friend' of mine got my account suspended for a month. So ill pick it up at the start of november.
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Patience is a virtue.
Been doing some achievement hunting lately and got both Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Episode 2 at 100% completion
Now I'm playing through BioShock 2 to get the majority of the achievements there. Also Dragon Ball Xenoverse, Rocket League and Cities Skylines. So many games to play!
I've finished Broken Age because it was free on PSN - got very tedious in the second part. And I've been playing the Battlefront Beta, and I like it, and I might buy the game. Which is funny because I've never seen Star Wars.
I just completed Armikrog. Wow, what a mess. It's almost funny. It's a glitchfest.
I finished it recently in a Youtube series. It was an interesting experience. Bugs and sequence-breaks aside, you can really tell they were under budget for the scale of the ideas. They raised what, $900k for this?
It's a game with no characters, no plot and very little setup for the weird ending.
That said I enjoyed playing through it for the most part. Maybe it's because I was recording and just goofing around for the camera. The peak of the game was definitely the planet colour puzzle.
I just wished the main characters could shut up. Forever. It would be beneficial for the game. And maybe they could've saved some money on voice acting and fix more bugs.
I tried playing Inquisition, but I couldn't. The game is sidequest overkill, and they actively distract the player from everything, often sending you to some weird location you don't even know what you're doing in, or if you're even supposed to be there.
Don't get me wrong, I love games with a lot of sidequests, like Fallout and TES, but Inquisition? Too much for me.
I just beat SOMA, it's really good, oh my god you guys.
It's an insanely depressing story about identity, despair, human stupidity, laziness, religions fanaticism, consciousness and what it means to be human.
It's a fantastic game with a fantastic story and it blows Amnesia and Penumbra out of the water, it's their magnum opus.
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all Meechmunchie did by trying to troll me was distract from the fact you all have no regard for Hetro or their rights at all, none.
Finished Little Big Adventure. It's a fun game but with quite frustrating controls. It's about an adventure, which is either little or big, depending on how you look at it. Playing LBA2 now. It's better in every way
The first game was recently re-relased on mobiles with better controls... at least they looked better, I haven't played it.
I've played enough of the "Beta" of Star Wars Battlefront to give my full analysis.
Star Wars Battlefront is one of the most gorgeous looking and sounding games I've ever played. It captures the world of Star Wars perfectly. Hoth looks just like Hoth from Empire. All the models of the ships look fantastic, the animations are great and the heroes also look very good. Darth Vader in particular looks perfect.
It's also really impressive how well it runs considering the quality of the graphics. I didn't have a single problem with it. Over 60 fps at all times. Matchmaking works fine as well, I had no issues joining servers and had no lag problems.
However. Graphics and obvious Star Wars fanboyness (is that even a word?) aside. The game isn't amazing. It's fun don't get me wrong. But only for a while. Compared to Battlefront 2. The game is hugely dumbed down in terms of gameplay and content.
I do realize it is a "beta" so of course it's limited. But the actual full game doesn't even have as much content as BF2.
The two modes which got "tested" (EA's Betas are just playable demos alright. it's not a real Beta) are a mix of capture point and attack/defend. And whilst good on paper. In practice, they aren't amazing. They're actually not balanced whatsoever. Particularly on Walker Assault. The Empire have huge advantages over the Rebels. (following the films a bit too much eh?) And after a while. It just gets boring.
One of the main problems with the game is the spawning system just flat out sucks. You can spawn outside the base on Hoth and get spawn camped by an AT-ST or by tons of enemies. And at first, the maps are confusing so you have no idea where to go ontop of being spawn camped.
Also the controls of the Vehicles aren't great either. On Mouse/Keyboard. Your moving the mouse so much to turn the fighters in air. It just doesn't feel good.
They also just need to add more. If the full game is just like the Beta. it's not going to last long. The content is lackluster and the gameplay whilst fun, doesn't draw you in.
Agh... I really want to love this game. I think I enjoyed the game a bit too much considering the problems it had. I'm a big Star Wars fan and sometimes that overshadowed the game's problems. (I think that's what they were going for, sneaky bastards). If they fix it up a bit, I'll buy it...
Ever since Destiny shipped with only a barebones amount of content and took two years to be 'complete' my trust in Blockbuster titles like Battlefront has been finite. I haven't played the Beta, but I've watched all of 30 seconds of gameplay here and there and the game looks terrific. Unfortunately, it seems obvious the game will ship incomplete and likely spend up to three years having DLC offered to fill it out. Suddenly the 60$ blockbuster will be a 300$ moneysink.
Down the road, the game will feel mostly inaccessible thanks to the skill curve and necessity to participate in the DLC's to stay up to date. It will go from leisure to obligation with all of that investment. That's how it always goes for me.
I love Battlefront though, it's the only quality thing to come out of star wars in the last 20 years.
I've been catching up on some much needed Not A Hero.
Not a Hero is probably my favourite game released this year. Unfortunately, it's not yet available on The Vita. Maybe it would be if shlubs like me had actually bought it in the first place. There are plans to port it ("Fall 2015") but all of the news is months old. It took five years for Meat Boy to get ported to a Sony system so my expectations aren't high.
Hotline Miami is a game that helped me descend into a certain kind of madness. I mention this because there are many parallels between Not a Hero and Hotline; they both use sparse pixel graphics to tell a very violent story, they're both published by Devolver and they both have an undercurrent of black humor. Hotline Miami and Wrong Number ended up being essays on the nature and use of violence in culture, a sort of dissertation on why the amount of fun you have playing them isn't a good thing. They're great games, but at a certain point the guilt trip on your bloodlust becomes clear and they become less engaging. Also, I got most of the cheevos so I'm not replaying them for awhile anyway.
Not a Hero holds no such pretensions. The story is told Mad-Libs style in the form of several Powerpoint presentations outlining missions and objectives by the main character, Bunnylord. Bunnylord is not playable, nor is he a participant in the majority of your missions but he is central to the game's ridiculous and lovably obnoxious story; Bunnylord (a seven foot tall, purple rabbit-man) travelled 50 years into the past to prevent the apocalypse by getting himself elected Mayor in some unnamed English City. His strategy? Murder all criminal elements and seize as much power as he can.
He employs a team of nine assassins/mentally ill people to bust heads and shoot doors. It's an incredibly fun game with a confluence of learning curves that help to accentuate the general ridiculousness of the entire presentation. Not every character is functional in every level and sometimes specific traits need to be exploited in order to complete side missions and unlock more characters. Here are a rundown of some of those characters: Jesus from The Big Lebowski. It's definitely him. A pelvic thrusting, purple-bloused nymphoid who can roll into an execution maneuver and sips a martini before collapsing if killed. Jesus rules.
Next up is my personal favorite, Mike. Mike is a twitching alcoholic rendered in all of 40 pixels. He's incredibly fast, he can execute without bullets and most of his audio is drunken slurring. Mike is my workhorse, unlocking him allowed me to blaze through a third of the game with no sweat.
The gameplay is very slick and easy to understand but difficult to master. Not a Hero is "a cover based sidescrolling shooter", genre blended as can be. The key to success is using your characters dodge, the distance and agility of which is determined by that characters speed, to slip into cover, knock over enemies and dodge out of incoming fire. You can take cover anywhere and everywhere but shooting will expose you. It's very quick, very twitchy and extremely fun. Getting caught in a crossfire is generally a death sentence so making use of space and knowing when to back off is essential.
The game worlds are populated with preset powerups and random drops that help make each attempt at a level unpredictable and fun. The difficulty curve is hard to master, with the first, second and third acts separated by clearly indicated skill levels; after a few levels in Act 3 it's difficult to look at Act 1 as anything but an extended tutorial.
What really sets the experience apart is the humor, Not a Hero is a genuinely funny game. Somewhere between the sardonic elevator music used to illustrate objectives (that mostly consist of kill everything) and the randomly placed ad-libs in the dialogue lies something really clever and heartfelt. The game knows it's funny, but it also knows you know it's funny so it never lays it on too thick.
I recommend everyone give Not a Hero a try because we need more games like this. It doesn't take itself seriously and as a result has endless allowance for fun.
Unfortunately, it's not yet available on The Vita.
Do people actually use Vitas? I bought one back when it launched and I haven't touched it since shortly after P4 Golden came out and I played it for a bit.
Do people actually use Vitas? I bought one back when it launched and I haven't touched it since shortly after P4 Golden came out and I played it for a bit.
The Vita was always intended to use digital distribution to its fullest, hence the early 3G models. The library of Cart games isn't very good and all of the quality cartridge based games are available through download at a cheaper price anyway. P4G was the game for the Vita and you'd be surprised how many people I've heard say exactly what you did, but the library has expanded into some pretty great territory.
It took me a really long time to get into the Vita. I actually had a first gen system within a year of its release and sold it really shortly after. It's a great little system, it just needed to fill out its library to realize its potential. A decent cartidge vita game (for example, Terraria) will run you 25$ retail in Canada. On the PS Store this same product is only 15$. There are savings galore.
If you like Persona look into Dangan Ronpa. It's not quite the same but it has some of the same flavor. Also just about anything published by Devolver is going to be a lot of fun (Hotline Miami, LUFTRAUSERS and Titan Souls spring to mind) but there's a ton of quality indie releases on the Vita store.
The Vita is also just a 90's era disc drive away from being a portable PS1 which is pretty boss if you have any old favorites from that system you'd like to revisit. At least a third of the games I have are PS1 classics. Still waiting for Tiny Tank though, that was always my fave generic PS1 game.
So yeah man, dust off that Vita and see what's new. If there was something on the system for you a few years ago there's surely something you'll like even better now.
