FMW

I've purchased both FE 3 Houses and Dragon Quest 11. On one hand that's a dumb decision. Two turn based, slow paced, million hour long JRPGs at the same time? That's enough to fill the schedule for the rest of 2019! But actually I'm finding that they're a killer 1-2 punch. Fire Emblem is a pretty demanding and granular game. You need to manage the allocation and durability of every item in your army, every units current class and future class pathing, motivation, support rankings, etc. And I'm playing on hard/classic so I need to pay close attention on the battlefield. Meanwhile Dragon Quest 11 is the opposite. The combat is VERY simple, the world is vibrant and pleasant to spend time in, the story is simple, the game literally reminds you where you are and what you're supposed to be doing every time you boot it up. If I've had a rotten day at work or am low energy, Dragon Quest is the "easy listening" game option in my life. And I have Fire Emblem for when I have a block of time and I'm like "all right, I'm fired up and gonna put some quality time into a video game and beat that sucker". ...the play hours thing is still a problem though. At my current pace these two games are literally going to be the only things I play until January.

It's unfair that so many games have lame subtitles like Judgement, Awakening, Rising, Rebirth etc and then there's Shin Megami Tensei III with both Nocturne AND Lucifers Call. Both subtitles are bangers and both are unused by other games. So many games would be improved by these subtitles. Bioshock: Lucifer's Call. Pokemon Aria and Pokemon Nocturne.

Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne This game is too old. The newer SMT games are better. Better balance of combat options, better UI, more demons, better story arcs, better save systems. But SMT Nocturne is such a foundational work to this series I had gotten it into my head that I need to play it. FINALLY after 3 years of chipping away at this file (to say nothing of multiple failed attempts longer ago) I beat it. I didn't play on hard, I was probably overleveled, and I would never have gotten the super strong Freikugel spell without finding out about it online. But still. I won. I beat the goddamn game. This one's been my white whale for a very long time. Do not recommend. I'm glad to have it done.

I've been doing this thing where I just buy 1 new smallish platformer game every week or two and work through it then buy another one. It means I'm spending about $10 a week and I've been quite happy. So far my progression has been: 1. The Messenger. I made a thread about it. It's okay. But not my favorite. Could potentially buy the sequel that they set up at the finale. Also what's with indie games that took forever to make setting up sequels? The Messenger, Iconoclasts, and Axiom Verge all do this and then there's been nothing on any of these sequels because tiny team development takes forever. 2. Steam World Dig 2: It's super good! Everyone seems to agree on this point. What's most interesting to me is how they mix fixed level design with open ended level design. I've never seen anything quite like it. The challenges are fixed, but the player gets free roam to dig through a lot of the environment. So you always need to overcome the stuff, but the exact sequence and difficulty of the jumps ends up determined by how smart your dig path is. Steamworld Heist was good, but I could play a new Dig game like this every year. 3. Iconoclasts. It's a collection of good parts that maybe don't go great together? The big focuses are story and puzzles. But it's an exploration platformer type game. So you end up stopping for lots of talking and stopping for lots of tricky puzzles. It's good story and good puzzles, but I never really got into a flow with this one. Weird pacing. But still overall good! The game is very smart about realizing that it's not an action game or a platformer game really and tailoring your upgrades and challenges to match. This is 100% a game to play on easy. The action element is unimportant so just make it negligible to rush through enemies faster. Beating them is not the point. 4. Sonic Mania: Super good! It's still beholden to the old games in some ways that we could probably move on from. I don't need green hill zone, I don't need to restart stages over and over to make attempts at a secret zone for a chaos emerald, I don't need to die if Sonic ever gets "pinched" by a moving platform even by a pixel. But the levels are great the music is great the controls are great and boy isn't it silly that they brought back MIGHTY and RAY instead of literally any other Sonic characters. 5. the Mummy Demastered: I just started this one. It's interesting. It almost feels like Castlevania 4 more than anything. Your character is a great big clunky sprite, you have limited mobility with punishing enemy knockback on contact, and the gameplay is all about setting up attacks using your 8 degrees of aiming. Fortunately Castlevania 4 is super rad so I'm into it.

Okay folks, hard question time. I can build one of two Pokemon teams. Which option is better: A team named after all the usernames in "Hackers" or a team named after all the call signs in "Top Gun". The Pokemon selected will need to fit the names. So the two options are: Zero Cool/Crash Override/Acid Burn/Lord Nikon/Phantom Phreak/Cereal Killer OR six of the following Maverick/Iceman/Goose/Viper/Merlin/Jester/Cougar/Wolfman/Slider/Sundown/Hollywood/Stinger

Currently playing Sonic Mania. Never really played old Sonic games. I love it! At first I hated it. The physics are so bizarre. Just trying to walk up a mild incline is pure suffering. Every motion at low speed feels like molasses. So I can see why someone wouldn't like that. But THEN I started to get a little better at it. And the levels started forcing me to be better at it too. Figuring out some jump timings, how you jump off slopes, how you can change jump angle with charge spin, etc. And now that I'm kind of into this, I'm starting to have these awful elitist thoughts. "Ah yes. Lesser platformers aim to give you control that is precise and simple to interface with. You can understand Mario's jump arc in seconds. Such games are for the unwashed masses. Sonic is a more refined sort of platformer, that requires much greater investment and understanding up front and is subsequently much more rewarding for those with proper understanding of the form. Those who dislike 2D Sonic merely are unable to appreciate it's esoteric momentum based pleasures." Oil Ocean sucks though. Haaaaate that level.

I wouldn't recommend skipping 9. That's one of the very best Dragon Quest games. It's a radical departure from the traditional formula, but it's not like it's poorly executed or anything. And the story still hits that great melancholy beat that the best Dragon Quest games do. The only reasons to skip DQ 9 are that you don't have a DS/3DS to play it or because you're bummed out you can't get the free extra content anymore since the Nintendo wifi DS system went down. If you're going to skip one, skip 7. So so so much bloat. Good content is in there! But I'm not sure that it's really worth the slog to experience it. Also DQ 4 is my favorite and every JRPG ever should steal its structure.

The other day I was making the point that immersive sims kinda have a uniform tone. They're always doing this post apocalypse/dystopia/post apocalyptic dystopia (hi Bioshock!) thing with brutal murdering and high difficulty stealth and lots of fiddly parts. So I asked why this is, and what an immersive sim with a pleasant disposition might look like. The answer I got is that maybe that game is Zelda Breath of the Wild. I thought that was an interesting perspective. And it makes me think about some of the directions the inevitable sequel might take differently.

Reinforcements when they're already there from the get go aren't reinforcements. They're bad intelligence.

Well I started playing Valkyria Chronicles. But then that had characters to put in your army from Skies of Arcadia. Vyse and Aika. At first my reaction was "This is lame, what's the point of putting all this work into developing your wartime scenario tone if you're gonna dump some happy go lucky JRPG heroes in there"? But then I thought "Huh, I should go back and play Skies of Arcadia after this. That's a good game and I never got more than an hour into it." And THEN I reached the Desert Tank and that sucks. So now I'm playing Skies of Arcadia! I'm like 15 hours in. That's a good game! The slow load in and animations in the encounters is the biggest anchor weighing the game down. If battles moved twice as snappy as they do then I would be totally happy. But as is with slow encounters not only does that slow dungeon crawling to a, well, crawl - but it ALSO makes me not want to explore the sky to find sidequests. Because the encounters are frequent, they are weak, but they are slooooow. Everything else is good though. Great when drinking, I don't get so impatient then.

Sonic and the Black Knight It's... bad. Really bad. It's kinda mind boggling how a game with this much production value made it out with such little polish given to the interactive component. I played through almost the entire game in one sitting while working through a bottle of whiskey. It wasn't a great Wednesday.