Mister Jack

I love Nioh but those are legitimate criticisms. I'm really hoping they improve it for Nioh 2 because then it's going to be almost impossible to put down.

You know, it's funny. I struggled through like 20-30 deaths for a lot of those brick wall bosses everyone has trouble with, but on the attempt where I finally beat them, final boss included, I ended up not even needing to use any resurrections to get through it. It's like I suddenly became awesome out of nowhere.

Damn it feels really good to go to new game plus and curb stomp all those bosses who were giving me hours of grief before.

Oh, my bad, I got the name wrong. You hit them once and can hit them two or three more times coming down. The extra hits are small but they add up.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice I'm not usually a guy who likes From games, or at least not the ones they've been making since they became popular. I never finished a Dark Souls, and while I played through Bloodborne and enjoyed it well enough, I haven't felt an urge to ever go back to it. This game is the first one that really appealed to me. For starters, From did away with a lot of the bullshit I didn't like about the Souls games. You don't get your health bar chopped in half when you die, you don't have to turtle behind a shield all the time, there's no stupid forced PVP mode, the poison filled level is a lot shorter, and the story is a lot more straightforward and doesn't require a wiki to get the gist of it. In fact, I was so into this one that I went out of my way to get the best possible ending and kill every single boss and miniboss in the game, minus a few that are only available on the routes in the other endings. I'd say that this game captured better than any other I've played the feeling of being in a sword duel to the death. You truly have to master your blade or you won't get anywhere. Alright, I've kissed this game's ass enough so let's talk about what I didn't like. The ninja tools are a really cool mechanic, but they're highly situational and I went through a majority of the game without using a single one. I tried to at several boss fights, but most of them come at you so hard and fast that you really don't have the chance to use anything except the firecrackers. The gadgets feel like an afterthought when they should really be a major part of my arsenal. Also, the camera fucking sucks in this game and is by far my biggest complaint. There's no worse feeling than when you've got a boss on the ropes but then he gets you up against a wall and you end up dead because you can't see a damn thing. There's also a mechanic where your sword barely does any damage to ghosts unless you use a certain item on it first. Said item is rare and hard to find. I hate when games force you to use rare consumables just to stand a chance against certain enemies. It's annoying, stressful, and completely unnecessary. Fortunately I never reached the point where I used up all of my stock and had to go grind for this item, but I imagine there are plenty of people out there who have since you don't get it back if you die. Lastly, the boss fights are mostly fair, but I can think of a few that are completely unreasonable, the final boss being a major offender in particular. Putting all that aside, I'm glad I gave this game a chance. It has a lot of the Dark Souls DNA in it, but it really is a different kind of game entirely and most definitely not "Dark Souls in Japan."

Something I only just now realized is that you don't always have to hit the deflect button for every single hit in a combo. One of the optional bosses felt impossible until I discovered that as long as the hits are real close together, you can just hold down the button to deflect the first one and the others will be deflected automatically

Surprised this thread doesn't exist yet. Sekiro is hard as balls so I figured we could use a space to discuss tips and boss strategies. Or just discuss the game in general, of course.

Putting narrow corridors in games with bad cameras should be banned. Putting bosses in those same corridors should be punishable by forty lashes.

It's not the worst DC trailer I've seen and Phoenix seems like he could be an alright Joker but the idea of a Joker origin story just rubs me the wrong way. It ruins a lot of the character's mystique.

I've put a few hours into Sekiro now and so far I like it. I'm sure I haven't gotten far enough for it to get really hard but I've killed four or five minibosses and decided to take a break when I hit the first proper boss and got my ass kicked. If I have one major complaint so far, it's the camera. I'd say that about 2/3 of my deaths up to this point have been because the camera got into a position where it was impossible to see what was going on and I got killed while struggling to get it back under control. A few mechanics are also poorly explained and I had to look them up on the internet to fully grasp them. I'm having fun so far, though.

I'm still on the fence about this game so I got a used copy just in case it doesn't gel with me. We'll see what happens.

Waiting in a digital line on Fandango to buy Endgame tickets and it hasn't updated in three hours.

The original TJ&E is by far one of my favorite co-op games of all time. This one added online play, boosted the maximum player count to 4, and added a bunch of new characters so it was pretty much inevitable that I was going to buy it. I'm pretty much an expert at the original so I beat this on my first run in about an hour or so, but having a bunch of new modifiers to unlock for future playthroughs gives me plenty of reason to keep going back over and over.

Blaster Master Zero I bought this back when I first got my Switch, played through three or four levels, then got distracted by other things. However, the sequel has come out recently and I hear that it's supposed to be really good, but I never feel right playing sequels before getting through the originals so I decided to come back and finish it. For the most part, this is a pretty good remake. It adds modern features that the original didn't have, such as save slots, and on top of the updated graphics they also added some new content, a proper story, and new bosses. They changed some stuff around too, though. For example, the boss that was on the cover of the original NES game, arguably the most iconic enemy in the franchise, is now fought in the tank rather than on foot, which turns him into a joke. As a matter of fact, several weapons in this game (particularly the wave gun and lightning gun) turn the dungeons into a cakewalk. Granted, you lose the weapon if you take a hit, but it's not that hard to get more power-ups. This is a mostly good remake but a few things kind of drag it down. For starters, there's fall damage when you're out of the tank. I don't believe fall damage should ever be in a platformer, but even if you are fine with it most of the time they went way overboard here. Jason will take damage just from jumping down from one platform to the one beneath it. No, you have to walk off of the platform if you want to go down without taking damage. God help you if you want to jump down the length of two platforms. That's instant death. Also, the ladder controls can be finicky, so if you ever jump for a ladder and can't grab onto it, well then you're going back to your last save point. Finally, this game forces you to 100% it if you want to see the final world and true ending. To be fair, this isn't that hard to do. All you need is every boss and every upgrade, and by the time I had to backtrack I had already done about 80% of this stuff just playing normally, but it still annoys me when games do this. Even with those problems, I'd still recommend it. It's not expensive and it's a decent amount of fun. Of course, if you don't care about playing the games in order than you might want to just skip to the second game, which everyone says is better anyway.

The former is probably a given. The latter is probably wishful thinking.

If they wanted good will they would have promised to never allow Fallout 76 to appear on Steam.

The WSJ is reporting two new Switch models. The Switch Mini will be a cheaper Switch with fewer features and the Switch Pro will be more powerful but more expensive. I'd post a link but there's a paywall.

What in the hell?

Shazam! I lucked into an early screening and I can confidently say this is the best DC movie so far, excluding the Nolan films which are really their own thing at this point. There's no ridiculous Zach Snyder grimdark, the humor is actually funny, the story isn't a hole filled mess that desperately tries to set up other movies in the cinematic universe, and for the most part the characters are written well. It is an origin movie, but Billy Batson has so much fun discovering and playing with his new powers that my favorite scenes of the movie were actually the ones where he's testing out random powers to see if he has them and exploiting the ones he finds for fun and profit. Yeah, it makes him feel like a douche bag for a bit but honestly, who wouldn't do the same in his shoes? This is the first DC movie that I think is good enough to compete with Marvel. What didn't I like? Honestly, not much. The story follows familiar beats, I suppose, but it's a comic book movie. That's what they do. The CG isn't as good as Marvel's, but it's not all over the place like Justice League and it's still of an acceptable, if not outstanding quality. The villain isn't as good as Marvel's best but he's better than their worst. Really, I'm having to think a good bit to come up with complaints. This was a fun, funny movie where DC finally decided to stop taking themselves so seriously and just embrace the comic book silliness. One thing that doesn't matter to me but I guess I'll mention it is that it might be too intense for small kids. It's mostly fun and lighthearted but a few scenes with the villain had grisly and violent onscreen deaths that had the kids in my row clinging to their parents.