I like the guests. I just wish they did co-op against bots or matchmaking so they could talk about Mahjong strategy a little more. Watching Jan play mahjong poorly as they mostly talk about unrelated stuff isn't what I personally wanted from this feature.
I mean, my only headstart on the series is 3-4 hours of Yakuza mahjong, and Jan's playing is still killing me. He doesn't seem to understand the absolute basic rules about what lets you win a single round.
Loving the series! Some more weekly mahjong/Mahjong Soul tips (in roughly descending order of importance):
When to call
Some people in the chat were saying things like, “never chi” or “only pon for dragons.” This is bad advice. The better beginner advice is something like, “only open your hand once you have a guaranteed yaku.” Of course, that still doesn’t always apply—you might open your hand early as a gamble and hope you get the tiles you need for a particular yaku, but this can be a bigger risk than you might think.
Maybe the way to put it is to only pon or chi when you know exactly what yaku you're going for, and are ok with 100% locking into the plan to go for that yaku.
But I bet beginners still underestimate exactly how big the gap is between keeping your options open and locking into that one yaku, just in how big the pile of good draws is to pick from.
They're already very close to the level of understanding I got to win the Mahjong tournament in Yakuza Kiwami 2 (after like 5 manual loads at the championship so I didn't have to replay the whole tournament).
I think every winning hand was just a Tsumo with a Riichi, except one hand of all pairs because all pairs is a pretty easy hand to remember counts as a win.
I'm looking forward to learning how to benefit from opening your hand, or how things are scored, or how to read opponents, if they ever get that far.
With the PS5 haptics I can't tell if they're just being very unperceptive or if they really do want it as in your face as Astro's Playroom at all times. Like in demon's souls, the roll has a really satisfying haptics that starts from the center and works its way outward throughout the role, like you're feeling your hand hit the ground before your whole body hits the ground.
And in Sackboy, there's new haptics going off all the time, they just don't go all the way to obnoxiousness by putting it into literally every step like in Astro's. Sackboy is definitely my favorite game when it comes to haptic rumble. Single jolt hits are definitely a strong point of this new haptics over the old short rumbles, and Sackboy does something different and realistic feeling for a variety of single jolt haptics between hitting the enemy, rolling through and tearing a single sheet of paper, the noise poppers at the end score screen, and the click of a camera for the end level screenshot. It's extremely impressive.
I think haptic triggers are bound to be less varied outside of games with minigames because you can typically only have one action mapped to the triggers, and adding resistance to that action is almost always a hindrance to the gameplay.
Sackboy is interesting because it does add a little pressure to the triggers while holding stuff, but designers apparently thought it too much to apply it until after the trigger is all the way down, so you can only feel it if you let off a little and have to press down again to keep the hold. It would have been easy to just make that pressure be there for the initial button press, but I think it's telling the designers thought that'd be too in the way.
The one in the video happens to be the Carmen Sandiego game I remember. Was a huge accomplishment for me to catch anyone, so those animations were extra exciting.
Rough to revisit though. It was a lot more fun when the geography aspect still seemed like it could be an adventure and not useless trivia and school work.
AOE3 is my favorite strategy game ever, and I came to it being a big AOE2 like everyone else too. I thought most changes made it better, which made the reaction especially confusing to me.
I guess it's just what happens when you make huge changes to an especially beloved franchise. I'd be disappointed too if they changed it away from what interests me about AOE, even if the final product is good enough as a stand alone product.
I just wish people were a little more precise about what they think AOE2 did for them which AOE3 doesn't.
One potential assist that's in between allowing more savestates and playing world 5 forever could be looking at maps to know where every powerup and 1-up and 10 coin block is. Like, with two 1-up mushrooms and enough coins to get the extra life at 100, it'd be like starting with 6 lives instead of 3. Plus you could reliably become fire mario in 5-2 and 5-3
Think of it as if instead an adult streaming, it's just a bored kid with time to jump into every brick block and up through every blank tile of air to fully scout the level out. Thorough scouting is basically how I beat this one as a high schooler who wanted to beat it no warp/no save states/no guides on the wii vc. I probably didn't find the 5-1 1-up because it's very well hidden, but I'm sure i found the 5-2 1-up.
Or you can think of it as a more efficient chat tip, since they already took chat's help to find hidden power-ups. I could probably put into words where all those 1-ups and power ups are if that's somehow more acceptable.
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