burncoat

Legends of Galactic Heroes is a great space opera. It does a good job of making characters on both sides of the conflict interesting and likeable. It's also a bit more hard sci-fi where they go through the logistics of maintaining a multi-planet empire and things like that. Also has a couple of moments where I cried like a baby.

I'm a bit conflicted because I don't like the idea of gatekeeping games but on the other hand the Souls games have always tied the difficulty and death mechanic into the story. Death, dying, and difficulty has never been more highlighted than it is in Sekiro now.

The game's narrative stems from you dying and being undying. It's a lot like the whole ordeal with the Undead curse in Dark Souls, only the tone has shifted from "you will die over and over again" into "you dying is hurting the world and the people in it". There's a bigger and better connection to the story than there was in previous games and I actually feel a tinge of regret and guilt when I see the Dragonrot notifications pop up. I don't know these people all that well, but I know I'm causing them suffering with my poor play. Which makes it getting better at the game feel better also. I'm playing well not just so I don't die, but also so these people don't share the pain of my mistakes.

But this is also a 100% single player experience. One thing about the Souls games was the difficulty could be mitigated by summoning other players. That's pretty much akin to easy mode, even if your summons were worse than you. Just having an extra body to take aggro off, even if they weren't very good, helps against boss fights you're facing a wall on. The fact that there are NPCs to summon for almost every major boss fight in each of the Souls games shows that they at the very least wanted to give players some help if they were struggling solo. But as far as I'm aware of (I'm past the first lightning boss) there's been only one case of an NPC fighting along side you and he was pretty worthless. The game is leaning pretty heavily on the "No, seriously, get good" issues this time around. As much as the game rewards "lame it out" in some early boss fights, eventually you can't cheese enemies by running away or chipping at their health. You need to master or at least get way more familiar with the perfect deflect and posture system. Some people just won't be able to beat this game.

It honestly makes me worry about future games in this genre. I'm getting older, I can notice a significant decrease in my finger dexterity in some games. When I'm no longer able to physically get good, I don't know if I'll be able to play these kinds of games without some sort of difficulty adjustment. Luckily that's where mods come in, but judging from how defensive gamers got over people modding out Mr. X from RE2make I doubt it'd go over well.

If Stadia really does catch on get prepared for games with tight controls and games with a lot of particle effects to go by the wayside. As much as Google and more optimistic bystanders want to believe that latency won't be an issue, even at the hands-on event input lag was noticeable and felt bad with Doom Eternal.

Speaking for my own experience with "streaming" games, using the PS4 Remote Play and Steam Link, there seems to be inherent limitations. My house is wired with Cat5 cables with a max speed of 100Mbs with my computer on the second floor, my TV on the first, and my router in the basement with a total round trip of around 60 feet (roughly). When I played Dark Souls 3 using my steam link on my TV, the time it takes from me pressing a button, the signal going through my steam link, to my router, to my PC, back to my router, back to my Steam Link, and finally displaying the result on screen is significantly noticeable and I've died to numerous dropped or delayed inputs. And forget rhythm games like Thumper because it becomes completely unplayable with just the few milliseconds of lag. Even going the opposite way with PS4 Remote Play (my PS4 is on my first floor) input lag is noticeable.

The image quality also noticeably drops. Artifacting and compression becomes highly noticeable with sometimes half the screen disappearing in video artifacts for a few seconds on the Steam Link (on PS4 Remote Play the image quality was more consistent and higher).

So if you're expecting me to get better results over my 50-70Mbs internet speed connecting to a data center however many miles away just because their controller wirelessly connects to my router I got a world of doubt. Even under the best case scenarios, I fully expect certain games and genres to be utterly unplayable. Explain to me how this will be a positive force for change in the gaming industry when it will actively kill aspects of it.

If they manage to follow the writing from Tales from the Borderlands I'd be down. Telltale managed to make me actually care about the Borderlands world. I doubt they'll reach the same highs as the Skeeter send-off or the finger-gun fight, but I can hope they'll at least look at those moments and go "Yeah this was much better than anything we did."

I never played DMC2 but I've seen LPs of the other games. What was the reason why everyone put it at the end of the timeline? Dante doesn't seem anything like his DMC4 version from what I can tell.

I loved Moon and I'm excited to play this. I'm excited to finally see a mainline Pokemon game on an actual console.

I think they're going for a safer game for their first real console release. Maybe they'll switch it up afterwards.

I love Vinny but I hope he gets like a notepad with important bits on it. I hope he doesn't forget everything like Dan did in Metal Gear Scanlon.

"Oh this is my favorite game ever."

"What's this do?"

"I dunno"

I also haven't played Mass Effect 2 in a long time but I remember everything way more. I just get a little frustrated that I have an answer Vinny doesn't have. To be clear, I'm not talking about choice and decision questions, but specifically in regards to how the game works and plays. I like that Vinny is taking a backseat to how Alex plays and makes decisions and that so far there hasn't been an equivalent of forcing Drew to use the Riot SMG. It just sucks that Vinny couldn't or didn't explain what the new class abilities were and how much they changed.

From everything I've seen and heard, it looks like it's ripping off Warframe more than Destiny. Even the guns are said to feel more similar to Warframe than Destiny.

Broly is a fantastic Dragon Ball movie. Definitely the best Super movie and might be the best Dragon Ball movie ever (I have some fondness for the first 3 DBZ movies).

They saved Broly from his non-canon status.

Their store might be bad right now, but Epic's developer friendly practices will guarantee more developers want to be on Epic over Steam. Two things will happen if more and more developers choose Epic:

• Epic focuses on making the store more user friendly and easy to use.
• Steam starts giving developers more support and reduces their cut

I highly doubt Steam will just start willingly giving up more potential money any time soon. Epic's storefront getting better is way more likely.

This is probably Epic's biggest get right now?