#(well as 'solid' as soulsborne could get)

[katyspersonal]

Canon ship-worthy Bloodborne moments (compiling in case if I need it)

+ Gascoigne and Viola are an actual canon couple, even with two daughters!

+ The way Maria is concerned about Adeline's well-being specifically, with not wanting her to become blood saint and giving her the key, and Adeline likewise keeping her in mind

+ Gascoigne and Henryk were hunting in a pair! Possibly what hunters do often (for 360 degree vision so no beast crawls from behind), but that can be a good bond, plus clearly Henryk still cares for Gascoigne. (can never be 100% sure if Henryk is an actual 'grandpa' figure or they just refer a close family friend this way or that's just how they explained that to a little girl sdhdsh)

+ Other characters kicking our ass in a pair - like Forgotten Madman and his escort guy, the two ladies near Surgery Altar, two Hunters of Despair, two Yahar'gul hunters near the chapel). Honourable mention - the three Yahar'gul hunters that smashed a convenient lamp, and 'Djura and his three companions'.

+ Ebrietas grieving Rom ;-; Well, "death" for Great Ones probably is a bit different than for actual mortals, but in either case she has a reason to miss her in a loss kind of way

+ "Yharnamites don't like talking about their history" [ten minutes later] Hunter meets Alfred who is nothing BUT happy to infodump them about Yharnam's story and his special interest xD

+ Adella stalking hunter from around the corner and being way too concerned about the fact hunter accepts "dirty" blood, to the point of murdering Arianna if we do that too much. Questionable as it is a yandere trope but it is here.

+ Gehrman having such tender feelings for Maria that the warmth he put in her hair ornament moved the Doll to the point of crying tears of joy + Maria having very good feelings towards him (idealisation, admiration, crush - the word for it is vague in original and can mean many things). At least until she presumably was disappointed with his "curiosity". (could also be platonic, though)

+ The way Gehrman calls out for Laurence in his nap.

+ The way Valtr speaks of other League members. Honourable mention - Madaras Twin attacks you not only if you attacked Valtr, but also if he willingly passed the status to the hunter and numbers game'd himself. Clearly he is in the League not for the mission but for Valtr, and he just knows you are to blame if Valtr is gone.

+ Micolash and Wet Nurse are both against Queen Yharnam as she is crying near Wet Nurse's boss arena where her child is, implying she can't enter. Basically Mico and Wet Nurse raise the same child they kidnapped xD Feels like a very family activity, even if he clearly thinks about other women (Kos, or some say Kosm) in the bed :(

+ Whatever happened between Dores, Willem and Gatekeeper. Lore says both Dores and Gatekeeper accompanied Willem in the dungeons and lost their sanity together, but still remained loyal to their lord, take as you will.

+ Annalise and the deceased king of Cainhurst. It could have been a loving/voluntary marriage!

+ For the same reason, Queen Yharnam and whoever was her 'husband'. Depending on your versions it could be Oedon or some pthumerian guy blessed by the ritual from ring of bethrothal. Either case, she was SOMEONE's bride.

+ Emilia and Laurence, potentially! Could be entirely parasocial (as her growing around narrative of Laurence rather than knowing him), or entirely religious, but more or less it lays plain than average potential ship.

+ Edgar attacking us leads to him protecting Micolash, that doesn't line up with his affiliation with the Choir. He also does that 'Joy' gesture if he kills us XD Could be him having lost his sanity and controlled, but also it could be his decision.

+ Yamamura has throwing knives in his data, that are trademark of Henryk! Considering both characters were in the League, it could mean Henryk taught him to throw them, and considering Valtr's praised intimacy between the members... yeah

+ Whatever went down between like, four characters. Simon speaks fondly of Ludwig, Yamamura recites Healing Church hunters' prayer in the jail cell, Yamamura being a summon for Yahar'gul, another Yahar'gul hunter (not Antal btw) being in the same jail, Gratia being in the same jail, Simon having Fist of Gratia in his data... Anything could have happened between either of characters!

+ When we attack Lonely Old Dear, she notices the 'just like your father' - past the point she began confusing us for her child, so she has had a husband.

+ Julie attacking us when even Willem himself urges us to hunt Rom, and EVEN Damian, a Mensis Scholar is a summon to fight Rom. Could be her winning time for Imposter Iosefka, or could be her protecting Rom even despite common sense.

+ Potential of Crow of Cainhurst loving either Queen Annalise or Maria. He serves the Queen as the guard seeking blood dregs in blood-drunk hunters, but also Old Hunter's Bone is Maria's.

#bloodborne #use later #fandomry rambles #naturall all could also be read as platonic but i just make this list in case i need very solid base! #(well as 'solid' as soulsborne could get) #feel free to add more if I forgot! #val!!!! i see you are smiling as you want to add 'the way snatcher holds you when he strangles you'!!!!!!! #do not!!!!!! #/j #i tried to not mention basically coworkers like maria + brador or izzy + archibald tho #but yeah the well goes deep #i just wanted to focus on what developers were more certain about showing us #the fact they hid fist of gratia with simon and knives with yamamura tho...... the DEPTH of subtlety #if you ask me yamamura x simon or yamamura x that yahar'gul hunter are THE shit #and gratia is just a friend that does poly intervention sometimes to stop fights but is not big into romance herself #she is more interested in punching things xd #but yeah devs tried to tell us.. something #maria's broken heart on gratia as she goes insane and then dies has good potential tho...

[titleknown]

Dear Master,

I would like to start this letter by apologizing. I'm sorry I couldn't save you. I'm sorry I couldn't stop them. I'm sorry I couldn't be her.

I'm not sure how to describe what it is, to exist without a purpose when you've failed at all the others you've been given. You never had that problem. That's probably why I could never measure up. But I had to try. That's what you made me to do. I don't think I could do anything else.

I send you this because I have found a way. Your masterwork, taken by those who would spite you, has something at it's center. I found it in my search for you, or something left of you. I'm going there to find it. I will take my vengance on those who took your life. 

For if I cannot be your love, I cannot be your soldier, I can be your revenge. I can be your gun.

It is time I head inward. I know it seems strange to send a letter to a dead man. But, as you told me yourself, if you went away, who else could love me but a dead man? 

I will make sure that you love me. Wherever you are.

Dearly Beloved,

MARcELlA

-----------------------

HAPPY PUBLIC DOMAIN DAY, HERE'S A NEW PD CHARACTER! AND YES IT IS FOR THAT CHALLENGE!

To give some context on her backstory, long story short, she was made by this megalomaniac creator (think Walt Disney but more 80s) to replace his dead wife, only to be rejected by him when he realized she could never be a replacement. 

He's long dead now, and the scenario I'm thinking of has her delving deep into said creator's abandoned monster-overrun mega mall, which has sort of a "Synthwave-Soulsborne" vibe with a heavy emphasis on the fantasy side of science-fantasy. 

She's more a homunculus or; well; a living doll than a robot, and her goal is to find some big mystery at the center to become "a real girl," the one he wanted her to be, tho it would become clear that's basically impossible. 

Whether or not you get the good ending actually determines whether she learns to realize that she deserves to live as herself, as what she is. 

As a game I'm imagining a mix of soulsborne and character action game dynamics, but with the big twist of there being big setpiece dungeons that're lightgun rail shooter segments, super elaborate ones too, shaped by the stuff that you do in the exploratory-y side of the game, where she literally turns into a disembodied self-operating gun to do the sort of cool spectacle-y setpieces that'd normally be QTEs in other games. 

The idea was actually from trying to come up with a bunch of concepts derived from trying to design a character based on one of the core design ideas of The Guardian Legend's protag, and picking the one that felt the most thematically solid. 

The idea being, a protagonist who's a pretty lady with the power to change forms for the sake of switching between two very different styles of gameplay. In this case Soulsborne/Character-Action-Game and House Of The Dead-type rail shooter. Most of the ideas followed from there! 

Everything in this post is 100% public domain under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication license, free to do with as you wish.

And god, she kinda sparked my interest in doing more with this setting, because god "Synthwave Soulsborne" is a deeply evocative concept, given the air of melancholy around 80s nostalgia in this shitshow of a time period...

#my art #my writing #public domain #public domain day #synthwave #soulsborne #doll #abusive relationship #character design #creative commons #cc0 #80s

[valdotpng]

hello, hello! any other games you’ve been getting into? the demo for a soulsborne game called lies of p is getting some hype rn, wonder what your thoughts about it are too :0c

hello hello!! before i got diagnosed w/ cts, i started playing rain world w/ my friends and i really like what ive played of it so far!! unfortunately i had to stop for an indefinite amount of time, but if/when my right hand stops hurting so much, i deffo plan on getting back to it. now, i Could just watch someone else play it (like i did w/ majoras mask-- another friend of mine streamed it to me! i couldnt play it bc of.. well, one very obvious reason. but there was another big roadblock between me & that game since Forever: the time management used to intimidate me sooo so much. now i see that its not that scary tho, so id love to actually Play it as well one day!!) but i think i want to actually finish rw myself.

as for lies of p-- ive had my eyes on it ever since the first (?) trailer dropped!! predictably, i really like the aesthetics of that game. and based on what ive seen of the demo (watched iron pineapple's latest video haha), the gameplay seems solid as well! makes me quite excited for it!! hopefully the rest of the game is gonna be as good as what weve been shown so far

#wish i could play the demo to really get a feel for the controls but. alas. #val.txt #some other games i got to play b4 i got hit w/ the no fun allowed diagnosis were ultrakill & ror2!! #great games!! #ror2 didnt quite click for me personally (at least not yet. i havent played much of it so that might change in the future!) but i still ap #appreciate it. #and ultrakill fucks severely but i am so so very bad at it. so so bad u have no idea #i need to put some effort into getting better at shooters when i recover

[cosmichorrorsarestillnicerthanme]

I feel like you mentioned a while back that you wanted to get an ask about Malenia?? Well, either way here is an ask about Malenia. Tell me your thoughts on her, oh stupendous cosmic entity!

My Thoughts On Malenia Blade Of Miquella huh?

Well then I guess I should go ahead and say that my fascination with her, Miquella and the Haligtree Faction as a whole all began when I was trying to win her boss fight, needless to say it wasn’t going well even with my build at the time as optimized as I could’ve gotten it. So after Erdtree knows how many deaths I decided to see what info I could dig up about her lore wise which led me down a rabbit hole of proportions so epic it rivaled the one I fell down when I first got into Bloodborne. So after a day and a half of scraping the lore I could find on The Haligtree Faction together and making sure I understood it to the best of my abilities I went back at Malenia, died like forty or fifty more times before finally beating her first phase with enough Flasks to get through her Second phase.

I swear I know what I’m doing.

She is un-ironically one of my favorite soulsborne characters, only barely inched out by Maria Of The Astral Clocktower, and Ludwig The Holy Blade.

Her story is something that I *desperately* want to have expanded on just like Rykard’s (who in my opinion, has a story that’s a bit too cut and dry for a Soulsborne Game) not to mention the relationship she has with her brothers Miquella and Radahn mostly Radahn’s because both of them seem WAY to chill to have a fight that ended with Caelid becoming y’know Caelid. On the other hand Miquella seems a bit too squeaky clean to me for a Soulsborne Game, while I don’t think that the theory that he’s controlling Malenia or Mohg is true I don’t dismiss the fact that he was charismatic enough to not only successfully convince an entire army worth of people to join him but was also a master of Mechanics and Magic and his design overall just reminds me a lot of Grifith, but most blondes with long hair in games do so take that with a grain of salt (Now that I think about it The Haligtree is a lot like Falconia, but I should probably get back on track, this is about Malenia.) 

Her design is extremely interesting to me because of how extremely simplistic and down to earth it is, especially when compared with a lot of the other bosses like Radahn and his gold and embellished armor or Radagon and all the stuff going on with his broken teacup looking ass. Malenia’s dress is mostly brown and white while her arm and legs are surprisingly spartan despite being seemingly made of gold or a gold like substance. And speaking of her arm the shoulder pad thing she has it just does more to enforce that she’s a soldier or that’s what she views herself as. The only thing that goes against the entire motif she has is her helmet which is extremely embellished and covered in decorations like the wings on the side or the engravings on the top which might’ve been a gift from Miquella but that’s just a theory a GAME- *Get’s shot*.

Moving on from her design we have the aspect she’s probably most known for after being notoriously hard.

The Goddamned Scarlet Rot.

Which right off the bat I think is a misnomer, or at the very least isn’t telling us the full story.

I say this because in the real world Rot is something that is vital to life on earth as we know it, it decay’s the deceased matter from animals, plants and other things like them, allowing the nutrients to be returned to the earth after the decomposition is finished. In a lot of way’s the Scarlet Rot follows this process except on an EXTREMELY accelerated pace with some mutagenic properties tossed in, what i’m saying is The Goddess Of Rot that’s sealed away might not be a goddess of Death but a goddess of Rebirth, but aside from some theorizing with some at best shaky evidence it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting anything solid on that front until the DLC sadly.

I only really have two headcanons for her

the first headcanon is Malenia is definitely touch starved for prolonged physical contact, she "Desperately" craves another person's touch, even if it's just shaking someone's hand or being hugged, but unless they hold one of Miquella's needles or a ludicrous amount of bouleses it is forever a sensation reserved for her dreams.

The Second headcannon is that she's the worse person to choose in all of the lands between (Yes i'm including The Loathsome Dung Eater) when it comes to any form of diplomacy, not because she'd much rather fight but because she turns as stiff as a board when talking to any human being outside of Miquella, Loretta, and her cleanrot knights which she considers apart of her extended family.

#asks answered #cosmic does a thing #elden ring #malenia blade of miquella #miquella's haligtree #miquella the unalloyed #ask game #theories #game theory

[yharnamsnewslug]

Final opinion of Elden Ring:

- Love Torrent, wish he hadn't broken the code of the game and I could actually fucking use him in the boss fights he was clearly meant to be in (such as Elden Beast).

- Love the story, love the lore, I think this game has THE best boss fights that I've ever had in a soulsborne game. That said: no, Fromsoft, you don't need to make bosses have One Undodgeable Attack. The fun part is learning the dance, not assuming you'll have your foot stepped on.

- Hate the open world, please don't do it again

- Hate the crafting, it felt unnecessary

- This game truly felt like an rpg, FINALLY, and it was delightful to discover the different weapons and spells and arts I could yield, and the re-speccing was SO WELL DONE in this game. Delightful.

- More turtles in hats, pls

- The variety of enemies was wonderful until the third fourth of the game, when you go to get the flame. Why are there Caelid birds in this zone? Why are they like, three times as tough and dangerous than birds in their actual fucking zone? Why can every enemy three shot me all of a sudden? There should've been a curve, not a CLIFF.

- Why, oh WHY did the final boss have to suck so hard? Fantastic design, 0 thought into the actual fight...........unless i was supposed to have Torrent in it

All in all: 7/10. Solid fucking game, was fun to play, but I don't think it's the best by far. It has the flaws that DS2 had but amplified. Elden Ring is crushed under the weight of its own ambition and it SUCKS because I still feel a bout of adrenaline when I think about the fight against Morgott, which was insanely fun and lore-filled and made me very emotional.

#elden ring #elden ring spoilers #nico.gmr

[metaldragoon]

@justsuha​ filled this out, and I felt like doing the same.  Kinda felt they didn’t have the best categories so maybe I shouldn’t have bothered, also tried not being too repetitive with my picks. Favourite Game - Final Fantasy VI, this was an easy one for me.  One of the first games I ever played, then I came back to it around like 12-14 years old and it was the first game I ever played on an emulator, then it was one of the first games I ever watched an LP on, one of the first game I ever started playing with mods, and yeah, I’ve just played this game a lot in my life. Best Story - Mass Effect (1), could’ve gone with FFVI again but eh, and maybe Hollow Knight but I feel like the world building in ME1 is crazy-deep and unparalleled.  Maybe that’s not story in like a “plot” sense, but it’s what I settled on. Favourite Art Style - Killer7, was a comfortable pick but Persona 5 is also a really crisp game.  Also thought about other things that are more atmospheric like Metroid Prime, Hollow Knight, or Bloodborne. Favourite Soundtrack - Final Fantasy VI, like I said, didn’t want to be repetitive, so there was games that had like a banger of a track like Papers, Please, or something like Super Meat Boy, but I couldn’t really justify anything being equal to FFVI.   Hardest Game - Dragon Age: Origins, Felt like a Soulsborne game was the “gimme” answer so I wanted to swerve a bit.  DA:O is hard as fuck, if you’re not optimizing your build you’re not beating that game.  Even on “easy” I’m like chill man Funniest Game - Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door, was tempted to go Undertale but since that’s kind of just a parody game I feel like it had a lot more liberties it could take to still be funny.  TTYD is super funny while still being like it’s own game. Game I like that everyone hates - Gears of War 2, some kid in Gr. 11 said I should get a 360 and play that, and so I did.  I played the online mode so much, but it never really felt like a popular competitive game.  I liked being so beefy, it’s basically just one-shotting people with shotguns is the meta and so the whole stalking someone to close the gap to be in range was super fun to me.  Campaign kinda trash and my friend wanted to get an achievement for co-op beating it on the hardest difficult that was miserable for me, but I think it’s a really fun game to play with some great audio too, the SFX are top notch. Game I hate that everyone likes - Borderlands, hate is a strong word but man I don’t really care about this game at all and people have been hyping it up for a decade. Underrated Game - Catherine, all my irl friends I tell about this game don’t know what it is, until I remind them and they go “oh yeah, that game looked weird/was too hard.” don’t know anyone who’s actually played more than an hour of it.  It’s one of my all-time faves, though. Overrated Game - Breath of the Wild, my wife says I didn’t give it a “fair shake” but I played like 20 hours and zzz... was tempted to go with a Pokemon game too, but it’s more a franchise in general than a specific game. Best Voice Acting - Yakuza Kiwami, I didn’t really have any real opinions on a game having good voice acting; generally they don’t.  Yakuza is all VA’d in Japanese so that’s probably why, but it felt pretty cool and was the only thing that I could think of actively enhanding a VG experience.  Maybe shoulda gone GTA (3 or San Andreas), both are really dated and definitely don’t sound that good anymore but one of my favourite games to listen to dialogue from. Worst Voice Acting - Metroid: Other M, not bad in terms of the actual talent of the VA’s but damn if it doesn’t ruin everything about Samus as a character.  “REMEMBA ME?!” Favourite Male - Kazuma Kiryu, was tempted to go General Leo from FFVI, but couldn’t find an image big enough before I resized this, which I could have easily worked around, but I also really like the Dragon of Dojima! It’s weird because he seems like such a simple design but he’s just badass in the right way, and I don’t know why more games can’t get it right.   Favourite Female - Franziska von Karma, from the 2nd Ace Attorney game.  For some reason had a huge crush on her, when I was younger I even drew some fanart of her which I ain’t done for nobody but her and Broly. Favourite Protagonist - Samus Aran, wanted to go with a “franchise” character and Samus is always super cool (except in Other M), I’ll always be excited to play her in some new game.   Favourite Village - Kakariko Village, felt like kind of a weird question, ‘cuz like if it was favourite area or something, I could have put some other stuff (Greenpath in Hollow Knight for example), and being a village I feel like basically limits you to medieval games but not the main hub either as that’s “a city.”  But Ocarina of Time’s Kakariko Village is always really fun to roll in to, also thought of the Goron Village, or just any village in Secret of Mana because that village theme is soo good. Most Hated Character - Nathan Drake, have barely even played Uncharted, but I just always hate any character with his personality, and he’s the biggest and most well-known.  Maybe he’s fine but meh. First Game You Played - Super Mario World, can’t say for 100%, but this and Super Mario Kart were games I was playing a lot since at like 4 or 5 my older brother owned them and they’re the most baby friendly.  Also remember playing a lot of PC games that my dad had, Timon and Pumba pinball, Chip’s Challenge, Ski Free, and stuff like that.  Skunny Kart Racing for DOS but I never understood how to get to DOS. Favourite Company - Bioware, I don’t really care about gaming companies in general, but Mass Effect and DA:O are some of my favourite games.  I might say Square as well but they do a lot of stuff.   Hated Company - Ubisoft, don’t hate them all but I just feel like they only make games I have zero interest in. Depressing Game - Doki Doki Literature Club, this and creepy are kinda really similar I feel, but I went DDLC but I kinda forget how it even ends.  I just remember feeling bummed about the purple and pink haired girl, and then the Monika scene just being uncomfortable (in a good way). Creepy Game - Doom3, don’t really play creepy games, Doom3 was suspenseful so I don’t know if that counts.  I had it for like 2 years, played it once for like 10 hours straight, and never played it again.  Still lives in my head. Happy Game - Super Meat Boy, is this a happy game? I don’t know, I feel like it’s got a pumped up energy which I equate to happiness.  It’s fun and the music makes it really addictive. Favourite Ending - Metal Gear Solid, don’t really have a great answer to this.  I really like Meryl and Snake riding off on their snowmobile though.  

#me #looking for a sugar daddy

[sirbadgerduke]

Retrospective Thought: Top Ten Games of The Year 2019

Another year down and just on the horizon beckons another year into the light, and this year was a real wild ride for games. From triumphant returns ala Devil May Cry V to huge disasters ala Anthem. What is a defacto truth though; there’s plenty of great games that came out this year, and can only make us wonder what is brewing for the new start of a new decade. As we close out the 2010s and enter the 2020s, I think we should look back on the great games that came out in 2019. Obviously this is MY list of games that I LOVED playing this year, I haven’t played every game to ever come out this year so there’s bound to be a favourite or two of yours not on this list. I respect you either disagreeing or agreeing with me. So here goes, the Ten Games of the Year. Honourable Mentions: The Surge 2, Mortal Kombat 11, Monster Hunter World: Iceborne, Blasphemous, Oninaki, My Friend Pedro, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3:The Black Order, Dusk Diver, Daemon X Machina, Death Stranding, MediEvil Remake, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

10) Plague Tale: Innocence(PS4/XBO/PC) This title is very much a sleeper hit in my opinion, a game published by Focus Home Interactive, who have been killing it in the “AA Experience” space of games with the likes of Styx, Greedfall, etc and Plague Tale, is a game worth checking out. You play as Amicia De Rune, who must protect her younger brother, Hugo, from Inquisition guards, villagers and a deadly swarm of plague carrying rats during 14th century France. The story slowly builds drama, tension and atmosphere with a fantastic setting that is surprisingly overlooked for more contemporary settings and locales, the idea of making Rats(for most of the game mind you) as this unstoppable almost “supernatural” force is both genius and frightening. Above all else the characters are well written, many parts believable and many parts relatable, you’ll be feeling their trials and tribulations as you go through the games 17 lengthy chapters. The gameplay is surprisingly both solid and janky at times; taking on a stealth system that mostly works well, you gradually gain a number of tools to deal with both human and vermin obstacles all the while with a small number of bosses that feel more like a mix of combat and puzzle solving. The game is worth picking up if you’re craving a smaller, less busywork heavy kinda game.

9) Astral Chain(Nintendo Switch) Platinum Games is one of my favourite Action Game developers currently in the industry; they make great combat systems with deep mechanics all the while adding more depth than you initially thought could possibly be able. While it’s not on the same level as NieR: Automata, Astral Chain continues the trend of Platinum Games nailing their signature style of gameplay; over the top whacky combat with anime as hell storytelling. This time you play a cop of a special police division that focuses on investigating the Astral Realm with your own Jojo-like Stand called a Legion. You’ll go on missions to battle these weird creatures, investigate the areas, even helping people and picking up litter(yeah, really) all the while slowly opening up your repertoire of Legions at your disposal. This is standard “Goofball anime nonsense mixed with badass tier combat and gameplay” that you either love or hate from Plat. While it’s not the deepest combat system out of their library, it is a rather interesting and fun premise with the combat focus being on the switching between Legions and their placement on the battlefield, the game offers its own level of depth, even if its a pond compared to the likes of Bayonetta 2 and NieR: Automata. If you want an anime as fuck, fun romp, Astral Chain is for you.

8) Code Vein(PS4/XBO/PC) The Soulsborne-like clone fad is a weird beast to look back on; while some heavy hitters have come out of it(NioH, Surge to some extent, hell Hollow Knight,Jedi Fallen Order) there’s been some real stinkers( Lords of The Fallen, again, Surge to some extent), it seems to have caught the industry hard as you could easily find at least one clone you’ll like and one you despise. Code Vein is a very weird Souls-like game in that it’s focus isn’t really a particular gameplay mechanic they introduce into it, or even how it offers “loot” but more on its focus on a narrative and characters. You play as a nameless revenant that wakes up with amnesia and a pretty white haired but barely clothed girl. It’s your duty to collect blood beads to keep your hunger sated. As you explore and push on the story opens up, introducing new characters and locales with a enough variety to keep you interested. Gameplay wise? Combat is solid, it’s admittedly very soulsy, so love it or hate it, that’s how it does things, plus you have the option of having a CP controlled companion with you on your journey to help alleviate some of the difficulty. Where the game shines in gameplay is it’s endless combinations and build opportunities, allowing you to really cater to a unique playstyle best suited for you or a more typically fantasy build if you so choose. Bosses, however are a huge mixed bag of good, bad and just outright frustrating. If you really want an Anime Souls-like, you would do yourself a huge disservice to miss out on this one.  

7) Outer Worlds(PS4/XBO/PC) Obsidian Entertainment does a really good job on making some great RPG titles. From KOTOR2 to Fallout: New Vegas and even their own IPs like Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, Outer Worlds is no exception among this collection. While the game is set in an alternative future, you are awakened by a mad scientist named Phineas Welles from cryosleep only to find that most of the passengers are still in hibernation aboard a colony ship. The game features several factions and a branching story that reacts to the player's choices. The writing is pretty damn great, witty and intriguing, something severely lacking in later day Fallout titles. Outer Worlds is pretty much a Fallout Game without the fallout licence only it builds from New Vegas’ strengths rather than let it get muddled down with Bethesda’s weaknesses. It even comes with it’s own take on the VATS system. The gameplay is solid, it’s just New Vegas but better, whilst in the grand scheme of things? It’s not the thing that will win you over in the long run. If you’re a Fallout Fan sick of the current trend Bethesda is in or whether you’re looking for a great Space Adventure, Outer Worlds is not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice!

6) Greedfall(PS4/XBO/PC) Oh Spiders, Spiders, Spiders. This dev company has steadily grown strong from game to game. From it’s rocky beginnings with Of Orcs and Men and Bound by Flame to the almost good Technomancer, Spiders have, in my honest opinion, have found their major hit and boy has it been a hit for Focus Home Interactive. You begin as De Sardet, a human who’s sent with his cousin to govern newly discovered island, neutral in the varying factions and war that is happening all the while you seek to find out more about the this mysterious illness that plagues the De Sardet family, so that you can cure Greedfall, honestly, is such a weird game to come out in 2019 but one I do not regret having played at all. It’s reminiscent of old Bioware titles like Mass Effect 1 and Dragon Age: Origins; the gameplay is solid and fun allowing you a nice enough variety to go deep as you want whilst having a rather engaging story and narrative that is populated with companions that all have very different opinions and often clash with one another’s. It feels like a game that should’ve been released back in 2010 from Bioware, in a good way obviously. While it’s not graphically impressive, the art style is really nice and the world is both intriguing and bleak. Worthy a look into if you’re seeking that old bioware-esque flair that’s seriously missing from Latter Day Bioware.

5) Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice(PS4/XBO/PC) One of my all time favourite games is a From Software developed title by the name of Bloodborne, which is also my all time favourite PS-Exclusive. My hype for Sekiro was almost reaching the moon since the teaser was shown back in 2018, a chance to travel to Japan with that Souls-like style if you will. Only it’s the least Souls games in the Souls style of games that is developed by the originators of the brand. The focus here, is less on builds, blocking and dodging and more about your posture, parrying and loadouts and the gameplay absolutely, masterfully services that to a T.The Bosses are some of the best in the series, almost better than Bloodborne’s roster, but with the addition of mini bosses that roster is pretty huge(for better or for worse). You take the role of Sekiro, a ninja who’s service is needed by Kuro, a bearer of the Dragon’s Heritage; power/curse that grants anyone they deem worthy with immortality, however, when they die and resurrect it runs the risk of infecting people with Dragon Rot. The more narrative focus is a nice change of pace in my opinion and with the added blend of japanese history with mythology giving it a rather rich and surprisingly lived in world. Sekiro is definitely worth getting if you fancy yourself more dueling style gameplay.

4) Judgment(PS4) Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios have become another of my favourite game devs in recent years. Their work on the Yakuza Franchise is a blessing for a revamping of a classic Adventure/Savage Beat’em’up Hybrid, though they’ve since become the most popular and one of very few to exist. Judgment is a sorta separate entity/spin-off to the mainline franchise but still somehow connected(Unlike the great Fist of The North Star: Lost Paradise title.) to the Yakuza story in a much smaller degree. You play as Yagami, a private detective who was once a renowned lawyer until he was disgraced by one his star client who went on to murder another victim despite being found innocent. That’s as much as I can say about the story since the game is essentially a Crime Drama/Mystery with a little bit of Yakuza DNA. The cast of characters are all great, the villains make you want to absolutely bring them down a peg and the good guys really makes you root for them to win and push through the struggles. As is with Yakuza, the meat and potatoes of the series, the gameplay, is on point. Continuing the savage Brawler system but extending it into a more personalised style for Yagami, with his own heat moves and skills to boot, it’s fantastic and absolutely a treat to pull off combats, especially switching between all three of the styles. The Boss battles are a sweet as all hell, especially Cane Guy, who’s probably the most anime as fuck character you face of against. Buy it if you love Yakuza and crave for more, or if you’re new to the style of games.  

3) Resident Evil 2: Remake(PS4/XBO/PC) Survival Horror is a genre that seems to struggle, with the occasional surprise hit that everyone gets behind. With that in mind, Resident Evil 2 Remake is a fantastic survival horror game that brings back the franchise to its roots and redoing them with a great, brand new shine and paint. Resident Evil 2 Remake puts you in the shoes of Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy during the Racoon City Incident, while Claire searches for her brother and Leon goes to his first day on the job at RCPD, despite being told not, they must survive and avoid the monstrosities that roam the city, zombies, Lickers and the big bad Tyrant himself Mr X. A very nice remix of an old formula that gives it some new life, RE2R has impeccable atmosphere, tension and horror, half being brought to you via exploring and solving puzzles and the other half from Mr X himself who stalks you down with a purpose; to take out any survivors in Racoon City. Gameplay is super solid, and surprisingly does not make the game a pushover, solid shooting mechanics with some great puzzle mechanics and ofcourse exploration whilst not being an open world make this a title worth having in your collection. Whether you’re a survival horror fan, RE fan, Old Skool style RE fan, you’ll do yourself a massive disservice not picking this gem up.

2) Devil May Cry V(PS4/XBO/PC) Honestly, you can just call 2019 the Year of Capcom’s return to form, by nailing it with RE2, MHW in 2018 and obviously Iceborne later in year, it was only time that DMCV would come out between those mammoths titles. After the disastrous ReBoot, everyone including me too were sure that DMC was put back in the ice for good. That’s of course before DMCV’s triumphant teaser at E3. Devil May Cry V continues the story of Sparda’s progeny, Dante as he helps out returning upstart Nero and intriguing newcomer V as they take on the new Demon King; Urizen. This game is absolutely fantastic and I can’t fanboy over it enough. The story, while simple and easy to follow, has great character development and pacing, bring characters into their arcs in ups and downs that steadily build up to a final confrontation that just might be my new favourite boss battle of all time. The gameplay! The gameplay, is, to put it bluntly; absolutely sublime. From Dante’s weapon variety and DT craziness to Nero’s new gadgets in the form of his robotic arms to the weird Summoner-style gameplay of V, the game is its most diverse gameplay wise and not once feeling janky and sluggish at all. The Boss Battles are all fun and really bring something to the gameplay to both push and test you to your limit. Devil May Cry may just be one of my all time fave franchises and to see it return so triumphantly? Actually brings a tear to my eye. A must, must, MUST buy if I’ve ever played one.

1) Control(PS4/XBO/PC EGS Exclusive) Aaaah, Remedy, bringing such classics like Max Payne and Alan Wake into this world, Microsoft did you dirty with Quantum Break. So where did it leave them to go? To spiral into the weird worlds of Stephen King, Cosmic horror and the SCP Foundation for inspiration, to which Control is born, a phenomenal Third Person Shooter Metroidvania-esque game with a solid narrative and a beautiful visual and art design. You are Jesse Faden, a person of interest that has been searching for the Federal Bureau of Control since an incident with them when she was young had taken her brother. I really don’t want to say more than that, it’s better for you to experience the story for yourself. Narratively speaking? It has some great SCP-esque world building and lore with a solid to really good story that’s pacing 80% of the time really well. Gameplay and visuals with music are essentially where this game shines for me. Solid as hell shooting mechanics with some really badass powers helps to bring this game alive, but you don’t have all those powers from the get go, they are steadily paced throughout to make sure you’re not vastly overpowered or underpowered, it’s rather nice actually. Visuals and music are sublime, both together make for some truly memorable moments and areas. As stated, this is a Metroidvania and so has a lot of isms associated with that style; locked off area you’ll obviously return to with new powers to explore further, a semi-open world map, etc. I can’t sing this game’s praises enough, I think this might’ve just beaten out Alan Wake for my favourite Remedy game. Absolutely get this game NOW. So there’s my top ten list to round out 2019, a truly great year of great games. I’m honestly really excited to see what comes out in 2020, as it looks to be quite literally STACKED with potentially great(and shite) games. Hope you all had a spiffn’ new years, and here’s to 2020, let’s see what’s in store for us now!

#From Software #soulsborne #souls #sekiro #Remedy Entertainment #control #code vein #bandai #capcom #resident evil #resident evil 2 #remake #devil may cry #devil may cry 5 #Dante Sparda #Nero Sparda #claire redfield #leon kennedy #obsidian entertainment #outer worlds #ryu ga gotoku #yakuza #judgment #spiders studio #greedfall #focus home interactive #a plague tale #plague tale innocence #platinum games #astral chain

[ranger-report]

Thoughts On: Mortal Shell  Open Beta

I want to start this off by stating up front that I am not a fan of Dark Souls in any way, shape, or form. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Dark Souls is bad per se. I actually really like the world the games have built up. I watch videos on the lore, the environments, the bosses, and I find it all thoroughly fascinating, it's just that when I play video games I like to enjoy playing them, and playing Dark Souls is like bashing my head against a wall repeatedly because I'm using my forehead in lieu of a hammer and these goddamn nails just won't go in the wall. Oh, I've tried to get into it; I've put in two separate six-hour runs, along with diving into Bloodborne because I'd heard that game rewards players who are more aggressive vs the measured style of Souls, but no matter what, I just don't have the patience to be punished over and over again by a game that actively hates me. So imagine my surprise when I not only got into Mortal Shell, but actually persisted to play through the entire demo.

Mortal Shell, developed by Cold Symmetry, is a Souls clone and proud of it. Currently, the open beta is available to download via the Epic Game Store. Pre-purchase is up and running for $29.99. The first trailer was released on April 1st of this year, but make no mistake, the game is no joke. Far from it. For those coming in late to the party, Dark Souls's gameplay revolves around slow, methodical combat in which the player has to read enemy patterns in order to know when to strike, parry, dodge, etc. Any enemy in the game can potentially be a bad time, meaning that if the player gets a little too cocky and impatient, a solid run can so south pretty fucking quickly if they're not paying attention to timing. That's literally what the game is: a massive, calculated game of timing, fueled by trial and error. If you die – and you will, frequently – you're sent back to the last checkpoint you camped at or visited or lit up. You'll have one chance to forge your way back to the point where you died, and reclaim all the currency you worked so hard to accumulate, but if you die again before you do, all of it is lost. So essentially we're working with a complex risk and reward system, in which any fight could be your last, any moment could turn ugly, and your character is having the worst fucking day they could imagine.

Mortal Shell takes this formula and puts a bit of a spin on it. Sure, you've got the health bar, the stamina bar – which depletes any time you attack, dodge, or run – the quick items, and the ability to parry and commit heavy attacks if your timing is right. But what it does differently is the character system itself. Most Souls games involve the player creating a character and slowly leveling up as time goes by. You could become a super beast depending on what you choose to invest in. Shell puts you in charge of a Foundling, basically a nameless/faceless lost spirit, who can inhabit the bodies of fallen warriors it comes across. Each warrior – called a Shell – has different attributes which can be leveled up. Some Shells are faster, some are tougher, and each one has their pros and cons to fit your play style. In the beta, we get two, named Harros and Tiel. Harros is a well-rounded fighter, your basic bitch knight class, while Tiel is more of a rogue, which a much higher stamina bar but can be hurt a lot quicker. Regardless of which Shell you choose to inhabit, you're carrying around what has to be one of the most badass swords I've seen in a video game in quite some time. Called the Hallowed Sword, it's two handed and looks like it could ruin pretty much anything if you put your mind to it. It has a secondary attack where it turns into a goddamn spear for massive damage. There's another weapon in the beta, a hammer and chisel, but I somehow missed that in my playthrough. I'm eager to dive back in and find it, but for now we'll focus on the sword. Sweet Jesus, that sword. If a fantasy game had the equivalent of a double-barreled shotgun, it would be the Hallowed Sword.

There's also a catch to hitching a ride in the Shells: if you take too much damage, the Foundling will be knocked out of the Shell, vulnerable and weak. You'll have an opportunity to get back into the Shell, and if you do, it's an instant HP refill and you're back in the fight. Your Shell can die twice, but if you're knocked out of the Shell a second time, it's game over and back to the checkpoint. This is inventive because dying isn't immediately a punishment, and it's also neat because the Foundling can still carry the Hallowed Sword while trying to get back to the Shell. I have a feeling YouTube is going to be full of No Shell Runs in which players go hard as only the Foundling, chopping, parrying, dodging, somehow escaping damage. And make no mistake, the naked Foundling will die in one hit without a Shell. Having a safety net like this automatically makes gameplay more forgiving and also more intense. Say you fuck up and get knocked out of your Shell early on, leaving you with just one more chance to get through to the next checkpoint knowing if you get knocked down again, you're done. That's a rush unlike many I've played in video games. Also the frantic panic of running and dodging as the Foundling, surrounded by enemies, trying to get back to your Shell, desperate to stay alive, is shockingly effective.

However, there's another weapon in the Foundling's arsenal: the ability to Harden. Pressing the left trigger instantly turns the Foundling into a rock solid statue, unable to move, but also unable to take damage for one single hit. Once the hit lands, the Harden goes away and the Foundling starts moving again. What is absolutely wild about this are the potential combat tactics that can arise. Because if the Foundling is moving or attacking when the Harden goes into effect, they will immediately resume what they were doing when the Harden is gone. So say you're going in for a light strike, followed up by a heavy strike, and before you can land the heavy strike the enemy goes into attack animation. You hit the Harden, freezing mid-swing, and the enemy connects – and then your heavy strike animation resumes, smashing into the enemy, staggering them, freeing you up to either dodge away or get in another attack. Some enemies will be staggered just from hitting your Hardened form, so even if you're not mid-swing, you'll have a window of opportunity to get in and sucker punch. But Harden has a cooldown period, so if you use it at the wrong time, you'll have a wait a minute before you can use it again. And come out of it at the wrong time, you could be facing the business end of a bad day.

What initially drew me to Mortal Shell was definitely not the concept of a Souls game, but rather that Cold Symmetry cited old-school first person shooter Quake as one of their influences on the game. By and large this comes across in the aesthetics: browns, grays, armor textures, otherworldly pagan imagery, skulls and bones and dark caverns, it's all over the place, and it's lovely. Grimy industrial atmosphere permeates everything. Enemies range from brutish bandits with swords and pikes, to imp-like creatures that poison you when they strike. And the monster design is a visual chef's kiss, craggy and awful and menacing. My personal favorite is the Pincushion Warrior, which I've dubbed because it looks like a goddamn pincushion. Walking around with an eyeless helmet and multiple fucking swords sticking out of its torso like, well, a meaty pincushion, when it notices you from afar it will pull out one of the swords and throw it you. It'll keep doing so until you get into melee range, at which point it pulls out two swords, one for each hand, and come at you fast and hard. Do enough damage to it and it will attempt a kamikaze maneuver, in which it rips off its fucking head to throw at you and release a poison cloud which does massive damage over time. Seriously one of the most metal things I've seen, and I cursed the fuck out loud when I saw it the first time. But the showstopper, the truly most outstanding beast in the beta, is the Enslaved Grisha, a lumbering monstrosity that looks like a combination between Silent Hill's Pyramid Head and BioShock's Big Daddy. You fight it in an icy cave, and its attacks are so thunderous it will shake loose stalactites from the ceiling which can fall on top of you for damage. It's fast, brutal, mean, and intimidating, and beating it was such a terrific rush that it made me wonder why I've never gotten into this style of game before when it feels this rewarding to win against a tough enemy. Maybe it's because Soulsborne games are vicious and unrelenting in their assault on the player as they slowly attempt to crawl their way through the environment. Here, it seems like there's just enough stacked in the player's graces to save them that it's simultaneously more forgiving and more brutal. With the Harden ability and the different Shells as combat style options, the choices presented to the player are unique enough to offer a deep challenge, but one that players themselves can modify depending on how they want to play.

There's a couple other mechanics that I want to touch on briefly while I'm here: Resolve, and Familiarity. Resolve is essentially a limit break with multiple uses. When you're attacking enemies, you're building Resolve, and can keep track of how much you're gaining via the meter above your health. But while it builds through attacks, it slowly goes away unless you fill a whole bar, and each Shell will have a different number of bars to fill. For example, Harros has four bars, Tiel has only two. Once a bar is filled, you'll be able to use the Resolve in one of two ways. The first is parrying; you can attempt to parry if you don't have resolve, but in my experience it worked better when I had a bar built up. If you've got the Resolve when you parry, you'll do so with greater success, but it'll also open up a window for you to hit the attack button immediately after. Time it right, and you'll do a powerful strike which will regain a large portion of health, which is handy as fuck when you don't have healing items, but also uses up a lot of Resolve. This can hinder you a little bit if you want to use your special strike. Remember how I said the Hallowed Sword has a super strike where it turns into a spear and does a fuckload of damage? Yeah, you need to fill up at least one or two Resolve bars in order to use it. I'm not sure if you need one bar, two bars, or a full load, haven't done as much experimenting with that as I'd like. Some things in the game are still obtuse, relying on trial and error to discover, which brings us around to Familiarity: picking up items in the game world at first gives only a brief guess at what the items will actually do, so you have to use them to figure out what their effect is. This can be positive, or negative, but the more you use said items the more familiar the Foundling becomes with the effect. Each item has a different number of times you need to use it to become completely familiar with it, but once you do, it'll unlock bonus side effects. For example, the weltcap mushrooms restore 40 hit points over the course of 60 seconds (the regen shrooms I mentioned earlier). But use them often enough, and the Foundling will get a bonus effect of being able to dodge once without using any stamina to do so. Meanwhile, using the tarspore mushrooms – which infect poison damage – will eventually make the Foundling immune to poison damage for 120 seconds. For me this is one of the more revolutionary parts of the game, which requires the most amount of trial and error and experimentation. Of course you're not going to want to use the poison mushroom again after it killed you with poison, but if you take it enough, next thing you know you're immune to poison for two minutes? This is wild when confronted with Imps that deal poison damage with each strike they land, or the fucking Pincushion Warriors and their suicide poison bomb. But at the same time, this could be a bit frustrating when the player gets rare items that are hard to come by, which may have huge bonuses, or massively negative effects. I love it, but also kind of hate it, though where Harden and Resolve add complementary aspects to the combat, Familiarity throws in the gamble of figuring out whether a consumable will do you harm, or make your day.

Mortal Shell has already impressed the hell out of me simply by being a Soulsborne game that I can play and not feel vandalized by, but also through sheer innovation and attention to detail. The atmosphere is thick and luscious, the combat is deep and so are the RPG elements, and there's a genuinely terrifying obtuse story being played out. I did have a few issues with my playthrough, notably the two times the game crashed, one of which forced me to force restart my desktop. A few other ragdoll glitches notwithstanding, the beta is a resoundingly solid experience which is promising great things for the full game. Something which, to my unending surprise, I have already pre-purchased based on this demo. May wonders never cease.

#ck burch #rubyranger #thoughts on #mortal shell #cold symmetry #dark souls #bloodborne #quake #soulsborne #soulslike #review #open beta #epic games store #ranger report

[sabotajuu-a]

                    Out of respect for my fellow roleplayers here, I didn’t want to reblog the original post with all of this so that the images didn’t stretch everyone’s dashboards, and I could put this under a read more.   The posts I’m referring to are @savagedesign‘s HERE, my response HERE, as well as THESE SCREENSHOTS of @discandi‘s post ( since I can’t link the post from the blog itself, nor force it to appear as a dashboard link ).   Apologies for the long post.

                    Regardless, here’s the tea:

                    First and foremost, I want to get the legalities out of the way.   The original poster states that the game’s box rating is M for MATURE, or 17+.   For the sake of posting my own information AS LINKED HERE for collateral’s sake, we can see from GameStop’s official website that the rating is the same where I live, which is in the UNITED STATES.   Other countries have mixed ratings, because other countries have their own laws regarding the proper age group to view said content.   So, while there are countries who say a game is rated 18+, and others state the ratings are 15+, so on and so forth, there are still laws that need to be discussed and taken into account.

                    The problem lies in the complications of differing laws across borders.   Just because you live in a country where the maturity age is considered 15+ to view and participate within certain types of media, doesn’t mean that you aren’t endangering other users across borders by writing the content within said media, where their country’s maturity age is 17+ or 18+.   To put it simply, A 15 YEAR OLD WRITING DEAD BY DAYLIGHT’S CONTENTS WITH SOMEONE IN THE UNITED STATES WHERE THE LAW IS 17+, PUTS THE OLDER INDIVIDUAL IN A POSITION WHERE THEY CAN BE HELD LEGALLY ACCOUNTABLE FOR YOUR DISREGARD TO THEIR COUNTRY’S LAWS.   And that, my friends, is called CORRUPTION OF A MINOR, because as far as the United States is concerned, you, as a person under 17 playing this game and partaking in its contents, are still a minor, regardless of the laws in your country.

                    And want to know why that’s a problem?   Because it can completely and utterly ruin that 17 year old’s life.   NSFW content is an umbrella term for all things considered within gore, smut / sexual themes, intense violence, blood, strong language, and things of the like.   Writing ANY NSFW content with a minor, regardless of any legalities determining age of consent for any and all media, is still illegal.   Allow me to source things that are applicable to this situation from my perspective, meaning me as a writer having to abide by the United States’ laws regarding content that is RATED M FOR MATURE.

                    ENTERTAINMENT SOFTWARE RATING BOARD ( ESRB )   :                                         MATURE RATING DEFINITION

Content is generally suitable for ages 17 and up. May contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.

                    CONTENT DESCRIPTIONS   :

INTENSE VIOLENCE: Graphic and realistic-looking depictions of physical conflict. May involve extreme and/or realistic blood, gore, weapons and depictions of human injury and death.

BLOOD AND GORE: Depictions of blood or the mutilation of body parts.

SEXUAL CONTENT: Non-explicit depictions of sexual behavior, possibly including partial nudity.

STRONG LANGUAGE: Explicit and/or frequent use of profanity.

                    These ratings and descriptions are put in place to protect individuals from exposure to darker and more adult themes.   This is why employees are LEGALLY REQUIRED to ask for identification when a person is purchasing age-restricted media, and why employees are further required to seek consent from a legal adult while mapping out the media’s contents when applicable.

                    The content ratings are meant to protect age groups from content that they are deemed too young to view as mapped out by a chosen government.   This is meant to ensure a person is old enough to handle seeing intense violence, blood and gore, while also hearing strong language or viewing implied sexual themes, and knowing that what’s going on in said media is NOT to blur the lines of real life’s morality.   So in Dead by Daylight’s case, the maturity rating is put in place because we have serial killers running around slaughtering survivors, cannibalizing them, snagging them in bear traps, chainsawing them, poisoning them, and then slapping them onto hooks.   Not to mention that Hag literally has one of her nipples out, which is still considered sexual in some definitions of the law.   We need to ensure that people under the given age aren’t going to go around tossing hatchets at pedestrians on the street, or electrocuting people with tasers or live wires, just because they’ve seen it in a video game.

                    While studies show that video games don’t make people violent, it’s very clear that there are situations where others may commit crimes inspired by the media they’ve digested before the recommended age, with or without parental consent or guidance.   Let’s move on to the legalities.

                    CORRUPTION OF MINORS                                         DEFINITION

Although it’s a pretty loose definition, the Pennsylvania Superior Court defines the phrase as “corrupting the morals of a minor” by explaining that it includes actions that would offend the common sense, sense of decency, propriety, and morality.

                    TITLE 18   SECTION 6301 ( a ) ( 1 ) ( i )   :                                         NON-SEXUAL CORRUPTION OF MINORS

Corruption of Minors is graded as a 1st Degree Misdemeanor punishable by up to 5 years in jail and a $10,000 fine. Since the offense is non-sexual in nature, an offense under Subsection (a)(1)(i) does not trigger sexual offender registration requirements under the Sexual Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA).

A person commits an offense under the subsection if he or she is 18 years of age or older, and commits one of the following acts: - The offender commits an act that corrupts or tends to corrupt the morals of any minor less than 18 years of age; OR ( cutting it here since the first one is all that applies here )

                    This literally maps it out right there.   To simplify it, a person who is 18+ engaging in media that is considered mature with someone who is below that age is committing a crime, whether they know it or not.   Because it isn’t SEXUAL CORRUPTION OF MINORS, the older party isn’t being put on the sexual offenders registry, but they do serve jail time, FIVE YEARS OF IT, which may make it difficult for them to find a job in the future, or assimilate within society when they’re out.   It is still damaging to a person’s life.

                    Now yes, a 2011 ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court found that video games are a constitutionally-protected form of expression, and that laws restricting their SALE OR RENTAL based upon violent content are unconstitutional.   However, this is restricted to just that, the sale or rental of violent video games.   If, say, a parent were to find the content you were writing with another person, and they disagreed with it and contacted authorities, the other person could still be charged if their country’s laws differ from your own, and they could serve some serious jail time while paying serious fines to the government, as well as paying for a lawyer to try and fight these accusations placed upon them from your negligence.

                    Therefore, @discandi, your statement     In fact here is the games rating in MY country     holds no validity to the argument because it doesn’t matter when you’re possibly endangering others.   The fandom is so up in arms about individuals under 18 writing in the community because of the content as advertised, because that potential about endangering another’s life in legal terms is a genuine threat.   We’re not completely saying minors can’t write mature content, we’re just asking minors to respect a writer’s individual boundaries without getting pissy about it.

                    Let’s get into the other portions of the debate, shall we?   @discandi‘s post   ( as linked in the first little introduction )   features some points that I have to disagree with, and that I find appalling.   Firstly, calling the community a bunch of freaks is a big assumption, and pinning the whole ra.pe fetishization argument on the entire community is an even bigger assumption.   Not all Dead by Daylight roleplayers are entirely into writing the super dark content, and in truth the community is EXTREMELY against portraying ra.pe, or writing du.bcon.   Take into account the community’s DISTASTE for the Freddy / Quentin ship.   People shipping killers and survivors together is not ra.pe since both parties are ABLE TO CONSENT considering all survivors are confirmed to be 21+, and all killers are confirmed to be 21+ with the exception of Legion’s members.   Frank and Joey are 18 - 19, while Julie and Susie are still in that unconfirmed area of being under, on, or over 18.

                    And now I just have to map out the tags in @discandi‘s post, as screencapped by me:

                    Your logic of equating people who write darker themes to enjoying and justifying ra.pe fetishization is extremely flawed, because generalizing the fandom into this umbrella assumption without any real solid evidence to back it up is quite unfair to those of us who just want to write out the gore, or the murder, or the potential verses and character dynamics to be explored.   Are there people in the Dead by Daylight community who fetishize ra.pe?   Sure, but you will always find people like that in ANY FANDOM.   MLP, League of Legends, Steven Universe, Supernatural, Soulsborne, Red Dead Redemption, Disney, the list could go on and you’ll still find some no.ncon fetishization in the media as produced.   None of us ever said it was okay or valid of them to do that, and we in fact tend to voice our distaste for it.

                    In my time roleplaying on this site, which has been seven, almost eight years now, I have never seen anyone write out ra.pe or no.ncon or du.bcon in roleplay.   Even in a fandom that features a game as horrid as OUTLAST did I never see someone write out or fetishize these aspects in roleplay, even when you have those featured and implied in the actual game itself.

                    So saying that people who write darker themes and are uncomfortable with minors writing with them in similar media are just ra.pe fetishist freaks is a HUGE STRETCH to make.

                    In addition, bringing up @starlyht‘s reply to me, as screencapped HERE:

                    I never said a minors have never played a mature game, nor did I say minors haven’t engaged in material marked as mature.   Hell, I’m sure everyone’s done it.   What I’m saying is that SOME people, not all, are uncomfortable with minors writing mature content because it puts them at risk.   It opens up the possibility of legal troubles, or just doesn’t sit right with their personal morals because they’re 18+ and just writing with minors is uncomfortable.

                    And just when I thought I was done, here we have @hallowkills with their VERY UNINSIGHTFUL POST which I’m so glad to have seen before hitting post.   You’re going to come on here and get involved in this discussion, when you’ve made one of the most hilariously hypocritical posts that counteracts the comment you’ve made pertaining to the argument at hand.

                    On July 24, 2019, you posted:

ok little psa but if you rp a muse that’s like... from disney or any media that’s primarily directed at children (like cartoons, etc) i’m probably going to block you because this is a slasher blog and michael is not compatible with those sort of muses

                                        (   PROOF HERE   )     (   TAG PROOF   )

                    Okay, that’s respectable and understandable.   Personal preference, I get that, but then one of your tags proceeded to state:

                    Which can essentially be taken as your refusal to write with adults who write characters from children’s cartoons because you don’t trust them.   The same can be said about adults who don’t want to write with minors who write adult characters or adult media.   It makes some of us uncomfortable, and in some ways, it’s illegal.   So why are WE being called gatekeepers, or ra.pe fetishists, or harassers when we could just as easily pin the same thing on minors who write adult characters and media?

                    And then you continued to make a post today shown HERE, screencapped just in case you decide to delete it.   How hypocritical do you have to be?   Imagine being a minor and getting mad about adults writing characters that carry nostalgia from their childhood.   God forbid someone enjoys something when it’s harming nobody.   However, minors writing adult content with certain people CAN harm them, punishable by law, and that’s the tea.

                    Checkmate, thank you.   Hope the free educating helps.   Have a wonderful day / evening, I think I’ve made my point and earned my rest before work.   You’re more than welcome to continue the conversation in IMs, as I won’t be clogging my dash up any more than I already have.

                    And before you ask for sources, I’m a criminal justice major.   I will happily post a picture of my degree on request, with personal information blocked out of course, and post proof of my education completion.   Sources regarding the law are from online, some textbooks, and my own knowledge of how the law works.

#i mean idk how to be any clearer #it's mapped out right there #nobody's mad. #we're just tired of this same shit day in and day out #when we're out here #making sure minors and adults alike are safe #discourse / #drama / #negative / #rape mention / #long post /

[breezeinmonochromenight]

(ADHD Anon) That was really inspiring, thank you! I just got diagnosed not long ago and thought I was just bad at gaming all this time lol. But you’ve definitely got a lot to feel accomplished about, it’s not easy for just regular people! ♥️ As much as I love the story (or really just characters tbh) it would feel so good to accomplish the mechanics!

I hate the buzzed feeling I initially get with adderrall but like... I promise having a diagnosis and something to help focus your attention is like a breath of fresh air. I waited so long to do something about it and when I finally did it felt like weight being lifted off my shoulders. Changed my entire personality for the better.

I promise it gets easier with practice and experimenting lol. It really does — regardless of anything else. I was shit at Soulsborne until I committed to it. Same with DMC, same with Metal Gear Solid/Rising lol. Now I’m working toward plats for all of them, and have played basically all of Soulsborne + Sekiro and half of MGS.

I also can’t stress how important it is with DMC to go into missions expecting nothing and just experimenting. Like I’m partial to certain moves with characters and once I started realizing which ones I could do naturally without any memorization I just kinda worked out how to play in a way that suits me from there.

I love the story and the characters as well! I just felt like that wasn’t enough for me, personally — since it’s a lot of work to make a game — and people take really fluid, tight, responsive controls for granted (a lot of games I love are so frustrating control-wise and make me want to scream). So it’s just my way of not letting it go to waste, too.

and I’m probably never getting MGR2 unless a fucking miracle happens so might as well bump my #2 hack n’ slash up to #1

#real bitter about that last bit lmao #anonymous #if that even is your real name #hack n slash #video games #dmc #devil may cry

[eldritchsurveys]

o86.

Who is that last person who harassed and annoyed you? >> I don’t remember. Who is the last person who made you feel hurt? >> Sparrow called Snape an incel the other day and I was so hurt lmfao What was the last thing you were worried about? >> Just minor things, like whether my debit card replacement will get here today or not (today’s rent day, so, like... it’d really better be in that mailbox when I go check in a half hour...). Are you worried about anyone now? >> No. Is your house/room a mess? >> My room is in a pretty solid state of disarray. I kind of gave up on it for several reasons. The rest of the apartment is in various stages of disarray simply because there’s a lot of stuff in it and not a lot of space for it. (This is part of the reason I don’t like having a whole lot of belongings; 85% of the stuff in this apartment is technically Sparrow’s. Imagine if I also had as much stuff as she did... we’d be buried.)

What was the last magazine you read and enjoyed? >> Game Informer. What time of day feels the most magical to you? >> Honestly, all times of day have different magical feelings. It also depends on weather conditions, time of year, my state of consciousness... Who are you jealous of? >> I’m not jealous of anyone, not consistently. What is the last physical ailment you took medication for? >> Cramps. Do you get motion sickness? >> Not usually. When I was living in NYC I would sometimes get vaguely motion-sick on long bus rides upstate, because I’d grown unused to being in vehicles that long. But it wasn’t ever anything serious and it usually faded away on its own. Oh, and one time I got on this stupid fucking ride at Coney Island that made me feel vaguely awful for the rest of the day, lmao. Shook up my equilibrium or whatever. If you are a youtuber, are you behind on posting videos? >> I’m not a youtuber. Who is a great youtuber you have recently discovered? >> I don’t pay attention to specific youtubers all that much, except for like... EpicNameBro, because he makes the lore-heavy Soulsborne playthroughs that I watch.  What color is your bathrobe? >> Royal blue and black (it’s a Ravenclaw bathrobe). Do you hate taking showers? >> I really do, currently, because the bathroom situation is not ideal for me (it’s way too small, there’s no proper ventilation, I never think it’s clean enough -- even though it... like, is, I’m sure, since Sparrow cleans the bathrooms every weekend; I’m just fucking insane). I’d probably enjoy showers a lot more if I had an ideal bathroom. Also, what’s really funny is that I didn’t have these problems when we first moved in. I don’t know what happened.  Do you still have your Easter decorations up? >> We don’t put those up in the first place. Neither of us celebrate Easter aside from going to the holiday service at the church. Does your head hurt right now? >> No. What is a great pain reliever? >> A dissociative hallucinogenic. Are you keeping a secret from anyone? >> No. Do you have feelings for anyone who doesn’t reciprocate them? >> I don’t think exactly-reciprocated feelings are reasonable to expect, from my standpoint anyway. Even two people who love each other are going to feel and understand that love differently. But that’s a semantic answer, I guess. Either way, the answer to the question remains “I don’t know, maybe?” I don’t know everyone’s feelings about me, after all. Is your hair wet right now? >> No. What year do you miss? >> I don’t miss a year. Would you rather be a contortionist or cartoonist? >> A cartoonist. Do you prefer singing or dancing? >> Singing, I guess, by a small margin. Is your handwriting neat? >> It’s a little wonky from disuse, but it’s usually legible. What Olympic sport do you wish you could participate in? >> I really don’t want to do that. Have you ever dreamt of being a famous athlete? >> Not at all. Do you have a rich friend that you’re jealous of? >> I don’t have any rich friends at all. Are you interested in a guy who has a girlfriend? >> No. Do most of the guys who like you annoy you? >> No. Name one guy who has a crush on you right now. >> ???? Who was your first celebrity crush? >> Matt Damon. What musical do you think you could play the lead in? >> I don’t think I could play the lead in any of them, but I’d love to just be a part of the experience for some of them (like Sweeney Todd, or Phantom of the Opera -- or, of course, Repo! the Genetic Opera, my favourite <3). Do you live in a mansion? >> Hell no. What medical conditions do you have? >> None that I’m aware of. How many phones have you had? >> Like, a brazillion. Do you wear leggings often? >> Nope. They make my legs itch, usually. Do you think Lularoe is a scam? >> Sure. All that multi-level marketing pyramid scheme bullshit is bullshit. Do you own any Lularoe products? >> Nope. Sparrow does because her sister was selling it for a while. She has a pair of leggings with a pattern of popcorn boxes on it, lmao. Do you sell any products? If so, what do you sell? >> Nope. Do you believe “It Works” is a scam? >> Yup. Are you waiting on a package to arrive? >> No, just my damn fucking debit card. What was the last thing you ordered online? >> I don’t remember. Are you responsible with money? >> I suppose. Are you responsible in general? >> Responsible enough that any irresponsible impulses I indulge usually don’t cause any lasting damage. Would you consider yourself mature? >> I really don’t care about whether I’m mature or not. Do you have any sunspots? >> No. What color was your locker in high school? >> I think they were all just... that metallic grey colour. Can you reach your ceiling? >> Not unless I’m standing on something. Do you have a reading nook? >> Nope, but I’d like that. Do you like to build blanket forts? >> I’ve never built one. :< Who is the cutest baby you know? >> lmao Hallie said he’s the cutest baby he knows, so I guess he’s the cutest baby I know by proxy. (I also know an actual toddler named Edward who’s pretty cute. He’s a tiny Sith lord.) Which celebrity have you been told you look like? >> Grace Jones and Harold Perrineau are the two celebrities I’ve been compared to, both of which are extremely flattering comparisons in my opinion. Do you use a nightlight? >> No. --I do have that moon lamp, though! I should see if that would be nice to have on at night. *chin tap* Do you feel alone? >> Sometimes, sure. If you’re in school, do you feel safe there? >> --- Do you ever cry in public or do you hold it in until you get home? >> I’ve cried in public before, especially because like... when you live in NYC there’s literally no such thing as privacy anyway. Might as well just get over it.

#surveys #survey #random survey

[aion-rsa]

15 Hardest Dark Souls Bosses

https://ift.tt/3AyS4vA

It’s easy to call Dark Souls the most influential game of the 2010s. Whether it was the deep combat, obtuse storytelling, or the unforgiving difficulty, dozens of other games have taken inspiration from Dark Souls in one way or another over the last 10 years. It’s even spawned an entire sub-genre of similar “Soulsborne” games.

There’s a lot to love about Dark Souls, but for most fans, the most memorable parts will always be the boss battles. We’ve spent hours trying to topple these bosses in the never-ending quest to “git gud.” There’s really no such thing as an “easy” Dark Souls boss. Their difficulty starts at “hard” and then increases to “borderline impossible.”

As we celebrate the series’ 10th anniversary, these are the 15 hardest bosses you will face in the Dark Souls trilogy:

15. Ancient Dragon – Dark Souls II

The second Dark Souls game gets some flak from fans since it didn’t involve Hidetaka Miyazaki in the director’s chair. Many gamers will tell you it’s the easiest game in the trilogy because of changes made to the gameplay without his guidance, but it’s still pretty damn difficult. For example, the Ancient Dragon hits very hard. A single stomp from his massive legs, or a blast of fire from his mouth will likely kill your character. At best, you’ll have just a sliver of health left.

But as with any Dark Souls boss, the Ancient Dragon can eventually be conquered with patience and practice. Just be prepared to die a lot before then. But at least he’s an optional boss if you’d rather avoid him altogether.

Things only get more difficult from here, and most of these fights aren’t as easily avoided…

14. Bed of Chaos – Dark Souls

Dark Souls is generally considered “tough but fair.” With enough practice, a dedicated gamer should be able to recognize enemy patterns and eventually beat almost anything the games throw their way. But Bed of Chaos comes pretty close to breaking that rule. Many would say this boss does.

This demon resides in a giant tree, and will wantonly swing massive branches at you as you desperately try to hit the two orbs on either side of the room to whittle away its life bar. Take out one orb, and a big chunk of the floor collapses. Manage to take out that orb, and now there’s even less floor to walk on as you have to make a blind jump into the tree’s branches to take out the heart of chaos. Even then, a big swing from the branches is likely to kill you if you’re not quick enough. Vanquishing the Bed of Chaos often depends more on luck than skill. 

13. Pontiff Sulyvahn – Dark Souls III

Pontiff Sulyvahn is really fast, which means you’re bound to struggle with this Dark Souls boss. He also attacks with two swords — one hits with fire damage and the other with magic damage. That’s tough, but something Dark Souls veterans can handle. The real issue is midway through the fight when he starts spawning a phantom that’s just as dangerous as he is.

Dark Souls fans thought they could handle almost anything the series could throw at them, but for many, Pontiff Sulyvahn was the first real challenge they faced in Dark Souls III. But the final game in the trilogy managed to get even more difficult from there. 

12. Capra Demon – Dark Souls

The Capra Demon has become one of the more iconic bosses in Dark Souls, a towering minotaur-like beast with two giant swords. Those who have bested him remember the first encounter well. Part of the difficulty with this demon is the two dogs at his side. Walk through the fog gate unprepared and they’ll make quick work of you before you can even get one hit on the demon.

The other issue is that the arena in which you face the Capra Demon is extremely cramped. The wall is as much your enemy as he is. Luckily, several different strategies have been discovered over the years to make short work of this fight. There’s even a way to take him out with firebombs without even entering the fog gate.

11. Centipede Demon – Dark Souls

The first challenge when it comes to the Centipede Demon boss fight is dodging its heavy hitting attacks while avoiding lava damage. The second part is taming the camera, which can regularly ruin a great run. Seriously, this might be the most glitchy boss fight in the game, although sometimes that can work to your advantage if the demon gets stuck in the scenery.

The Centipede Demon is also a good example of how sometimes you just need the right strategy to beat Dark Souls’ bosses, and how failure ultimately leads to success. Getting the Orange Charred Ring when you cut off its tail is a huge help here, and you don’t even have to beat the demon to get it. It’s worth sacrificing some souls on one run for the ring so that you can come back stronger the next time around.

10. Sanctuary Guardian – Dark Souls

After Dark Souls became something of a surprise hit, fans who conquered the first game were hungry for more. FromSoftware happily obliged the following year with the Artorias of the Abyss expansion. The first boss of the DLC quickly tested any gamer cocky enough to think they could breeze through the expansion. 

The Sanctuary Guardian is a massive, white winged lion who moves fast and attacks with lightning, poison, and physical damage. Not only do you have to be a high level player and have the right equipment to defeat this beast, but you also need to have nearly flawless dodging skills. And as tough as the Sanctuary Guardian is, it was actually just a prelude to the overpowered DLC bosses to come.

9. Slave Knight Gael – Dark Souls III

Slave Knight Gael is a case of slowly escalating difficulty. His first phase is a tough, but fairly standard melee battle. But then comes the second phase when he adds more attacks, and gains the ability to turn invisible and teleport. That’s bad enough, but then comes phase three where he adds in even more attacks, and now lightning randomly strikes the ground. 

What really doesn’t help matters is that Gael has more health than almost any other enemy in the game. Defeating him is a battle of attrition.

8. Knight Artorias – Dark Souls 

If you thought the Sanctuary Guardian was difficult, then good news! The next boss in Dark Souls’ DLC is even harder. At least Knight Artorias isn’t as annoyingly fast, but he makes up for that with a series of relentless sword attacks. And if he does try to get away, it’s only to use buffs that make him even more of a pain to deal with. The best strategy is to beat him as quickly as possible.

If you look closely, Artorias is actually fighting with a broken left arm, so he’s not even at full power for the battle. I’d hate to see what that’s like. 

7. Black Dragon Kalameet – Dark Souls 

You’ll first encounter Kalameet soaring in the background as you explore the Artorias of the Abyss DLC. That’s intimidating, but it’s really just a prelude of what’s to come. After facing other dragons, you might think that you can take him out by just attacking him from underneath. Nope. Kalameet will either stomp you to death or just fly away if you try that.

Read more

Games

Dark Souls Bosses Ranked

By Matthew Byrd

Games

Bloodborne Bosses Ranked

By Matthew Byrd

Attempt to attack him from afar, and his fire breath causes physical and magical damage, so it can’t be fully blocked. You’ve got a very short window to actually damage the black dragon during its assault, making for an extremely frustrating boss fight.

6. Four Kings – Dark Souls

Your view of the Four Kings is going to depend a lot on how hardcore of a Dark Souls fan you are. If you’ve just played through the game once, they’re actually not so difficult or memorable. The real challenge comes on New Game+ when their stats are increased.

Whereas before, you could brute force through one king pretty quickly, that’s almost impossible on a second playthrough (or later). You’ve only got about 40 seconds until the next king spawns, and it’s easy to get caught in a situation where you’re now cornered by all four of them simultaneously. Only the most skilled Dark Souls players are going to get out of that unscathed. 

5. Throne Watcher and Throne Defender – Dark Souls II

The penultimate bosses of Dark Souls II are actually way more difficult than the final boss battle. By themselves, the Throne Watcher and Defender wouldn’t be too difficult. They’re fairly typical melee knight enemies. Just having the right build can get you close to taking out this duo — except for one little wrinkle.

As soon as you defeat either the Watcher or the Defender, the one left alive will rush to the side of his fallen brother to heal him. You have to carefully split your attacks between them because you have a very short window of time to take out the pair before they come back at you in full force.

4. Darkeater Midir – Dark Souls III

Continuing the series’ tradition of ridiculously difficult DLC boss fights, Darkeater Midir is a massive dragon with high health and heavy physical, magic, and fire attacks. He’s challenging on your first run, but can one hit kill even the most seasoned warriors on New Game+.

Unlike a lot of other bosses, there aren’t many tricks you can pull off in order to cheese a win against Midir. Your best bet is to face him head-on with a melee build. If that’s too much for you, at least he can be skipped.

3. Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough – Dark Souls

Ornstein and Smough effectively act as the gatekeepers in the first Dark Souls — and really for the entire series. If you did in fact “git gud” enough to beat them, you should be able to beat the rest of the game without too much trouble. 

The challenge here is two-fold. They’re both very quick, and can synchronize their attacks. It’s very easy to end up cornered and taking massive damage. And unlike the Throne Watcher and Throne Defender, you can’t defeat them simultaneously. When one goes down, it just spawns a super powered version of the other. This fight requires quick reflexes, a strong build, and a solid understanding of the game’s mechanics.

In short, this boss fight is the perfect microcosm of the Dark Souls experience.

2. Manus, Father of the Abyss – Dark Souls 

Massive, quick, and capable of dealing heavy damage in an instant, Manus is the final foe you face in Artorias of the Abyss, making him the “true” final boss of the first Dark Souls. Even though you can summon assistance in this fight, and a few items will help negate his attacks, Manus’ speed and varied attacks make him difficult to predict.

Then there’s his health bar. It’s tricky to come up with the just the right build to damage him consistently, and even when you do have a strong character, this fight is largely a matter of endurance.

1. The Nameless King – Dark Souls III

First, give the Nameless King props for showmanship. This guy knows how to make an entrance, swooping into a fog-filled arena atop a very cool looking wyvern. It’s like something straight out of a heavy metal album cover. The first phase of the battle involves taking out the wyvern, and it’s actually not too bad for Dark Souls veterans (which you should be if you’ve made it far enough to face the Nameless King). A few different strategies work here.

But when the Nameless King dismounts, the real fight begins. It’s difficult to time when he’ll strike with his sword. His attacks do a lot of damage, and the only way to avoid his lunge is to roll through it. One small mistake can quickly turn into game over, but if you do manage to defeat him, you’ve truly mastered the Dark Souls trilogy.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Who do you think is the hardest boss in the Dark Souls series? Tell us in the comments!

The post 15 Hardest Dark Souls Bosses appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3lMDY3H

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[infraredpenguin]

Review - Darksiders: Warmastered Edition

[Platform: Steam] [Control Scheme: PS4 Gamepad]

So Darksiders 3 is a thing apparently. It’s looking... like a game, I guess, but I did quite enjoy its predecessors a fair bit when I played them ages ago. The problem is that I never quite finished Darksiders 2, getting myself sidetracked as I am wont to do, so what better time than with a new entry on the horizon to finally go back and finish up Death’s perilous journey?

As it just so happened, I actually had the Darksiders games in my Steam library, along with upgrades to their remastered editions. In light of this bounty of Darksiders goodness (and the ability to ignore the frankly absurd DLC policies for the original DS2) I figured I may as well check out these “improved” versions and start my journey out at the very beginning, with Darksiders: Warmastered Edition.

Back when Darksiders first came out I played it on the PS3 and very nearly got the platinum trophy for it (missing the trophies for playing on the highest difficulty and that aggravating griffon trophy, which I will get to in a bit). I loved it. It felt like a perfect blend of some of my favorite franchises. Okay, more like a great blend of one of my favorite franchises and another franchise that I think is pretty good. Now that I’ve played through it once again, and in an enhanced form that has largely left the gameplay as it was, I can say that Darksiders is a satisfactory blend of what is still one of my favorite franchises in gaming (Zelda), a franchise that I still like but haven’t touched in ages (God of War), and a bunch of half-baked contributions from other game types I don’t really care about (namely, rail shooters).

Why has my impression of this game cooled somewhat? Well, for one thing, I think I’ve just gotten better at analyzing games over the years and also have less patience for clunky game design and shoddy controls. But if I were to pin down what constituted a majority of my frustration with this title, it would be due to my experience playing games in the Soulsborne series over the past several months.

I actually saw more than a few people trying to compare the Darksiders franchise with that of Dark Souls over the past week, so apparently I’m not alone in making this connection. But for me, the biggest point of contention I have with Darksiders against Souls is just how sloppy the controls feel and how poorly realized the combat is.

You see, Dark Souls and Bloodborne have kind of ruined for me a lot of action games, I think. With rare few exceptions, any failure I experience in those games is clearly my fault. It gives me a very robust set of tools to make my way through their world and its up to me to utilize that toolkit effectively. Every movement has purpose, every action a clear intent, and failing to exercise due diligence in feeling out the situation will more often than not lead to my character bleeding out on the floor. The Souls games are, in a word: fair.

Darksiders is not fair. But I may not have noticed this had I not played on Apocalyptic difficulty. A big part of Souls appeal lies in its (initially) obscene difficulty. Without the game forcing the player to carefully consider their actions and master the systems inherent to the experience, your typical erstwhile adventurer will just throw themselves willy-nilly at any and all threats, powering through on sheer brute force thanks to a lack of consequence for making mistakes. With each Soulsborne game, you don’t have that wiggle room, forcing you to *ahem* git gud (I hate myself for that) if you want to progress. But key to this requirement is the fact that these games give you every possible opportunity to do just that.

I’ve been talking a lot about Dark Souls in this Darksiders review, but I just want to impress upon you the magnitude of how frustrating combat can be in a game that doesn’t finely tune itself like a Souls game does while still having prohibitive difficulty. Because Apocalyptic difficulty in Darksiders is most definitely very punishing; even if it doesn’t present a challenge as intimidating as that of Dark Souls, it still punishes mistakes without mercy, but it doesn’t actually give you the same ability to overcome those mistakes without feeling kind of boring.

The reasons for this are threefold:

1. You take an obscene amount of damage on this difficulty. There are minibosses in the final dungeon that can take out upwards of 5 full health bars with a single hit, and you can only have 10 health bars! This in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but combine it with the other 2 points and you have a problem that can only be overcome by playing it safe or keeping a lot of healing items on hand.

2. Hit-boxes are way too big. The amount of times that I could clearly see an attack land miles away from me yet still inflict damage was absurd. This is an even bigger problem when you consider how often you get swarmed by enemies, especially when you can’t keep track of them because this God of War-style action game keeps the camera right on War’s ass for some inexplicable reason. But this wouldn’t be that big of an issue if it weren’t for the fact that...

3. There are NO invincibility frames on War’s dodge! This is by far the biggest issue for a frenetic action game like this because it limits aggressive play by an astounding degree. Being able to dodge through attacks with precise timing is a big differentiator for higher levels of play because it allows you to maintain a steady offensive rhythm, allowing for faster resolutions and more engaging interactions in general.

Due to a lack of iframes, fights against more imposing enemies with long strings of powerful attacks just boil down to keeping your distance and popping in for quick hits when there’s an opening. It’s not exactly thrilling, especially when War’s dodge isn’t very satisfying to begin with. 

It gets worse with enemies like the aforementioned minibosses where you need to bait out a specific attack in a specific area to accomplish anything. For those fights, you need to wait until the very last moment for an attack that comes way too fast (for the enemy’s size) and has a hit box seemingly 50% larger than its effect animation that you can’t dodge through, which will hit you for massive damage. It’s frustrating as hell, and the best way to deal with it is to bait the attack at an awkward angle so you can just pre-dodge directly away from it and wait ages for it to bring the attack down. Boring.

I hate that I’m harping on this so much, but the lack of iframes really did kill a lot of my enjoyment. So much so that I feel confident saying that Apocalyptic difficulty just doesn’t really work in Darksiders. It’s not even like I had an extremely difficult time beating the game; it just felt unfair, despite also being kind of easy at the core of it.

But enough about how this game fails at being Dark Souls (and God of War, ‘cause I’m pretty sure that game had iframes), now it’s time to talk about how it fails at being a Zelda clone!

On the face of it, Darksiders does a lot of things right. It has some fun dungeons to traverse with interesting (if simple) puzzles to solve, and some pretty solid major boss fights at the end. It kind of misses the mark everywhere but the critical path though, missing the spirit of what makes Zelda games so beloved.

For one thing, the combat arena rooms get old extremely fast. There’s just too many of them and it’s much too transparent that they exist primarily as filler. I get that they’re trying to ape God of War at the same time as Zelda, but one of the biggest problems is that they never really do anything interesting with these arenas. It’s just, “Here’s a bunch of enemies you have to fight ‘cause magical barriers won’t let you leave. Have fun!” I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that many of these encounters could have involved puzzle solving of their own, such as requiring use of the environment to overcome the challenge, or even using the fight itself to overcome the environment in some way.

But outside of those arenas, there is an excellent illusion of non-linearity in some areas, even if there isn’t any real opportunity for branching. The worst that can be said for these dungeons is that they’re as straightforward as some of the lesser Zelda dungeons, which isn’t actually that bad.

But outside of the dungeons things don’t hold up so well, with the exception of the Ashlands, which could be thought of as a dungeon itself, in some ways. The biggest issue for me is the means in which you accumulate strength.

In Zelda games, you will find Heart Pieces and the like in simple chests, to be sure. But, many of those upgrades will require a more roundabout series of tasks to uncover or unlock, in a way that helps to more fully immerse the player into the world of Hyrule (or Termina or whatever). In Darksiders, every single upgrade is found in one of those simple chests, usually requiring a specific piece of gear to access, but never really requiring much thought beyond “Lock Meet Key”. I think a big part of this is due to how barren the world is, which makes sense considering it’s a post-apocalyptic setting, but still feels like a missed opportunity.

However, the biggest problem with the Darksiders progression scheme is the weapon experience. Put simply, girinding out XP for each weapon type is pointless busywork that adds absolutely to nothing to the game. Worse than nothing when it comes to one weapon, which, near the end of the game, just automatically levels up fully, rendering all your hard work up until that point completely fruitless. The only meaningful reason for this grinding is to allow the player to unlock new moves in combat, but these moves cost money (souls) to get anyways, so why bother with an extra gate, especially when enhanced moves don’t feel markedly different to begin with!

Actually, both weapon XP and grinding souls feel like some of the worst filler I’ve seen in a game like this. It just costs too much to buy stuff, which means you probably won’t use everything, and it takes way too long to get XP which means you have to go well out of your way to bring your weapons up to par which means you feel obligated to switch instead of actually wanting to. These systems exist purely as grinds for trophies/achievements, which is never a good thing. I don’t think I ever used/upgraded any of War’s Wrath Abilities besides Blade Geyser, which is kind of sad for a highest difficulty playthrough, normally encouraging players to make use of every tool at their disposal

I’ve been shitting on Darksiders a lot, but here’s thing... I still really like this game. I just wish I hadn’t subjected myself to Apocalyptic difficulty. It also shouldn’t come as any surprise that it fails to be quite as magical as a Zelda game nor should it be shocking that tacking on gratuitous progression mechanics does anything other than drag things down. That being said, there is so much to like about this game.

For one thing, it is absolutely gorgeous. Post-apocalyptic Earth has never looked so good (except perhaps in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West). The art direction is stellar, and with the HD facelift for Warmastered, it doesn’t look even remotely dated. Despite being set in barren wastelands and the dilapidated ruins of a bog-standard metropolis, everything somehow manages to pop. It is vibrantly muted in its aesthetic, and some areas (Twilight Cathedral especially) are truly breathtaking.

While it isn’t going to win any awards for storytelling, the plot is perfectly serviceable and the lore underneath it all is extremely compelling. Even if I didn’t care about War’s redemption arc, I still wanted to uncover more and more about this ravaged world.

The characters help here, each of them being clearly motivated (or just as clearly unmotivated, Ulthane) and distinct, with visually striking designs. You’re dealing with demons for the most part and one of the biggest twists in the game is that there is no twist involved with one of your “business relationships”. The voice acting ranges from perfectly serviceable to delightfully camp. War is laughably dour and stone-faced, almost to the point of absurdity, while Mark Hamill’s turn as the Watcher is, unsurprisingly, great fun.

While there are some pacing issues with the cutscenes, especially later on when things start moving along at an extremely brisk clip, the cutscene direction is excellent and makes use of some legitimately inspired cinematic techniques that feel as though they were ripped straight off a comic book page. The only real downside to these scenes is thanks to the Warmastered Edition. For some reason, the audio channels in cutscenes are completely unbalanced, with voices being extremely clear and loud, while everything else (music, effects, grunting voice effects) is almost inaudible. I tried my best to get around this issue, but couldn’t come to any real solution in the end.

And yeah, it does have good gameplay, despite all my griping. The flaws are just that: flaws. They aren’t game breaking or anything, they’re just all the more frustrating because they highlight how much better the game could have been with just a little tweaking. The weapons and movesets are all extremely satisfying to use, with the additional tools mixing things up in fun (if straightforward) ways. The controls aren’t perfect, and War does occasionally fail to grapple correctly at times, but they do the job more than well enough, for the most part.

The boss encounters are all very well done (if you can ignore the iframe issue) and excellent examples of class Zelda puzzle bosses. It’s also just fun exploring everything in your quest to tackle those bosses. Hell, Darksiders probably has my favorite fast-travel system in any game, ever. You don’t just pop into existence at some arbitrary map point, you actually have to travel on paths between worlds, and there are even a few important items hidden away on these paths. I can’t tell you how badly I want to see another game flesh out this fast travel system!

See, I wanted to get through all of those negatives right up front because I wanted to end on a high note. Darksiders is a great experience if you lov-- wait... ah crap, I did forget one thing to hate on...

That goddamn griffon rail shooter experience you encounter early on is the worst fucking shit ever. It control like shit. It throws shit at you with no impact. It’s just absolute chaos and has a bullshit achievement tied to it. It’s just shit. This game does not have good targeting controls, and thankfully you dont have to be too precise with them outside of this segment.

Anyways...

Darksiders is great. Play it if you haven’t. Play it if you have. Spoiler alert: Darksiders 2 is also great (in different ways). Just don’t play on Apocalyptic difficulty if you’re used to games with iframe dodging.

Final Score:

6/10 if you play Apocalyptic

7/10 otherwise

#review #game review #darksiders #dark souls #soulsborne #zelda

[littleyharnamhunter]

Some of you have been asking for my thoughts about #thesurge so far. At the moment I've beaten a few bosses and I'm in the fourth area. So far I think it's a good game. It's not on par with the #soulsborne games but it's a good game nonetheless. Graphics, sound and gameplay are all up there. It looks, sounds and plays just like I hoped it would. Especially gameplay wise the creators copy all the good stuff from other #Soulslike games but implemented a few new twists to keep it fresh and keep me coming back for more grinding, farming and gittin' gud. Story wise it's okay. It's not as intriguing as the Soulsborne lore but it's good enough to keep me interested. The setting is well done and believable but nothing new, just another post-apocalyptic world where an evil corporation messed up and practically destroyed the world with new technology. But that's okay, I didn't really expect anything groundbreaking here. The level design is good with lot's of hidden treasure and well placed shortcuts. The NPC's you encounter have just enough personality to keep you interested but none of it really intrigued me to search for more lore or to get me to listening that audiolog an extra time to find out what exactly is going on. So far the only real problem I have with the game, if I have one, is the main protagonist. The creator's just could have implemented a character creator because making him a pre-set person without fleshing out the character makes no sense to me. If they would just have given him an interesting personality, show signs of his struggle through this hostile world or give him an intriguing history it could have been a big plus compared to the Souls games (with a character creator and silent protagonists). There is no multiplayer component (as far as I know) and I personally don't really mis it but if you're really into PVP you will probably mis this. So all in all The Surge pleasantly surprised me. Graphics, sound and gameplay are very well done and addicting but The Surge isn't without it's flaws. So far The Surge is a solid, fairly challenging soulslike fix that keeps me busy while I'm waiting for the #Bloodborne2 announcement... #ps4 #xboxone #review

#soulslike #thesurge #xboxone #soulsborne #ps4 #review #bloodborne2

[terryblount]

Remnant: From the Ashes Review

Over the last few years there have been plenty of “Soulsborne” type games.  Some have taken things whole cloth, while others have introduced various mechanics from the popular action role-playing series.  With Gunfire Games’ Remnant: From the Ashes, the developers have put their spin on the genre with a third person shooter that feels like an amalgamation of numerous popular modern games and gameplay ideas.  While the comparisons are immediately drawn to the Souls games because of the difficulty in Remnant, it’s not quite as punitive of a game.  There are number of other comparisons that fans of those games will draw.  The world crystal are the bonfires that you rest at.  The enemies are overwhelming and seemingly tucked into areas of the map that’ll surprise you and catch you off guard.  The bosses are massive and brutal.  There’s an Estus Flask equivalent… etc.  But despite all of the similarities,  Remnant: From the Ashes definitely comes out feeling like its own thing.

Remnant has similarities to Dark Souls, but there are a lot of differences as well

The story of Remnant is set in a post-apocalyptic era that’s been overrun by the Root.  Your character encounters the Root at the early moments of the game and you’re helped by the survivors of Ward 13.  I’ve played through the game start to finish and I still don’t know exactly what transpired. Remnant: From the Ashes is a bunch of big moments with little exposition, and I was somewhat OK with that.  Most of the story content and lore that you’re going to get from Remnant is done by digging into the conversation trees or finding items in the ever-changing world.

I’ve played so many bad games over the years that I almost expect most games that aren’t the latest new release from the major publishers to be of a different tier.  Being on that second tier is sometimes a good thing.  Since the games don’t have the incredibly inflated budgets at these massive publishers they aren’t chocked full of the bullshit that those games have — Premium currencies, surprise mechanics, etc.  While it is a relief that Remnant: From the Ashes has none of that, you still expect the quality to be a little lower, but it’s not.  Remnant impresses on the visual front, playing this game on PC on ultra settings I had a smooth and stable experience online and off.  From frame rates to stability — everything just worked which is an incredible rarity these days.  Still, our time with the game had no problems in the pre-launch environment.

The world can be re-rolled at any time

While the technical stuff like frame rates staying stable in a third person shooter are important, Remnant has a great art style as well.  The game has a wide and varied number of locations to visit, massive bosses to fight, and and even wider variety of standard enemies to mow through.  I juggled with different ideas when I was playing this game, almost as if I had stereotyped the game into being bad.  Are these visuals actually AAA quality or is it generic Unreal Engine.  There were times where I thought to myself that this game has the generic homogenized look of the fictional game that you see playing on the background of a television show.  I think most of the thoughts about the game being generic aren’t helped by the game’s patchwork systems, which stitches together levels for a completely random playthrough each time you play.  Don’t like the current roll of the world, you can re-roll at anytime.

Now you’re probably thinking, OK that doesn’t sound like anything we’ve seen from a Souls game,  and you’re right.    The random nature doesn’t only do good for keeping successive playthroughs fresh, but there’s plenty you won’t see on your first go-round.  More importantly, if you want to utilize the online cooperative aspects of the game, you can have an entirely new experience with a group.  As for how much different it is, we couldn’t test every possible scenario, but what we saw was a pretty big difference.  You’ll encounter different bosses on different playthroughs.  The maps will be laid out differently, the enemies different.  While the overarching plot remains the same, the moment to moment gameplay is changed as there’s no memorization that you find in the souls series.  Enjoyable as co-op experience or as a solo RPG, Remnant was equally fun.  While I didn’t play the game to its entirety with a co-op partner we played enough it to get a really good feel for this part of the game.  It was enjoyable and we had no issues in getting connected.

The combat of Remnant is third person shooter, and it’s feels good.  One of the things I was worried about when I heard “it’s like Dark Souls with guns” is that the combat would get old after a while.  Thankfully the shooting is solid and snappy, with rewarding bonuses for accuracy that make combat tense and fun to play.  There are plenty of weapons to find in Remnant, as well as archetypes to build out that can lean towards close quarters or ranged combat.  While most of my playthrough was done with a ranged character that utilized a rifle, there were plenty of things to try in terms of boss weapons, weapons hidden in the world, or weapons that could be crafted.

Combat is a mixture of low-level easy targets that take one or two shots to kill and a smattering of stronger enemies which take a little bit more firepower to take down.  While the bigger, stronger enemies are limited to only  a handful of enemy models, there is a nice variety of lower-level enemy types that you’ll encounter as you progress through the five different areas you can explore in the game.

Pushing through these areas you’ll have to contend with these low level enemies and the goal is to make it to a checkpoint.  These checkpoints allow you to replenish your health and ammunition, and they’re usually placed just ahead of a boss fight.  Boss fights in Remnant are a mixed bag.  I had a ton of fun pushing through the many boss fights in the game, but a lot of them really leaned on managing a boss and their minions instead of a traditional boss fight.  This structure does feel very much like a souls game in its implementation, but there’s no real penalty in losing progression in Remnant.  Instead, you are rewarded when you reach checkpoints with the ability to warp back to your base of operations to upgrade weapons, purchase items, and more.

The Ward 13 base hub is central to the story of the game as its got a group of survivors there that have got your back.  You can upgrade your healing abilities here, purchase items to take with you, upgrade weapons, as well as craft items.  The crafting and upgrade system in Remnant isn’t too convoluted.  You simply need to find different iron types and scrap to perform upgrades.  As you progress you’ll uncover these iron types naturally.  There never really felt like a moment where the upgrades felt like a grind, in fact the game goes out of its way to make upgrading your character easier with the ability to warp back to Ward 13 at any time to do so.

There’s a lot to love about the simplicity and straight-forward nature of Remnant: From the Ashes, but there are times where you wish there was a little bit more meat on the bone.  You’ll meet some truly interesting characters throughout the course of the game, but you never really feel like you get to know them at all.  This trickles down to even the UI level, where if you miss an NPC character’s name, you might not ever see it again.  There’s also no quest log or equivalent to keep you on track or let you see where you’ve been, who you’ve talked to, and what you should be doing next.  There’s a universe here that’s probably more mysterious after you finish playing the game than it is when you start. For solo players this might be a point of contention, but for groups it really doesn’t matter all that much because the actual gameplay will take your mind away from that stuff.

Remnant does a lot right here.  The game is incredibly streamlined, which makes it somewhat of a breeze to get through.  There’s just the right amount of obscurity and mystery in the world to keep you guessing, but this mysteriousness can be a little frustrating at times as well.  At times, Remnant: From the Ashes feels incredibly honed, and at others, rough around the edges.

The Verdict

If you like loot shooters and some of the core systems from the Souls games, Remnant: From the Ashes shouldn’t disappoint.

Remnant: From the Ashes Review published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[sirbadgerduke]

Retrospective Thought: Top Ten Games of The Year 2018

Oi! 2018 was pretty good year games, innit? Maybe not as consistent as 2017 for quality, but I reckon it’s still a damn great year! Anyway, now that all the other Game of The Year stuff has happened, I think I’m going to do my own list, which I’ve done for a couple of years now. Well, let’s get to it, which games blew my socks and which 3 particularly royally blew my socks off!

10) Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker’s Memory(PS4/PSVita) Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth is basically Discount Persona with a Pokemon battle system(only with a cooler way of switching moves via a skill bank of sorts). The story, however, is not a follow up from the previous title but a companion story of sorts. You play as a Hacker whose account has been stolen. You embark on a journey to regain your account and to stop the person responsible for the whole thing. The story pretty much opens up as you progress, taking some of the previous game’s plot with a dash of “Alternative point of view” to boot. Hacker’s Memory has it’s downtime moments, sometimes it can feel like a real grind, but leading a team of your suited up fave digimon has never felt better, definitely worth picking up if you like Persona and Digimon!

9) Dragonball Fighter z(PS4/XBO/PC/NS I enjoyed both Xenoverse games, they aren’t perfect and the RNG is real ass with a side of cancer thrown in. People clamored for a new Dragonball Z flavoured, bonafide fighting game. ArcSys delivered on that front, and boy did they really deliver the goods! The gameplay is frantic, epic and balls to wall bonkers. It’s easy to pick up if you just want to fight around with your favourite characters, whilst also in-depth for those seasoned fighting game maniacs. The gameplay is top tier and an absolute pleasure to play. Pick it up if you’re a Dragonball Z, Fighting Game or both fan!

8) Darksiders III(PS4/XBO/PC) I love the Darksiders franchise. I enjoyed the first game, adored the second one, and now I really like the third iteration. Is it perfect? No, is it the best one? Not by a loooong shot, but the game is a blast to play. Following on from the previous game’s style, it’s a companion piece that follows Fury’s side of things during War’s trial at the Charred Council. Fury is one of the Four Horsemen, badasses that do badass shit when and how they see fit. While the first one is a more Character Action experience with Zelda-isms, the second being a reverse of that with a Open World and Dungeon styley, the third, is a smaller game that focuses more on a “Metroidvania” like world with combat feeling a tad like Soulsborne stuff. The bosses are all a treat to fight(well, except one), the world is aesthetically gorgeous despite not exactly being on GoW or Red Dead’s level. Pick it up, give it a whirl and enjoy!

7) Yakuza 6: Song of Life/Yakuza Kiwami 2(PS4) I can write a whole retrospective on this series, I absolutely adore this franchise with all my heart. Yakuza follows the life of Kazuma Kiryu; a form Yakuza big dog trying to live an ordinary life with his adopted daughter Haruka. Now, the story is a rollercoaster of badass moments, heartwrenching scenes with a dash of twists and comedic parts in all equal splendor. The combat, is easily a star alongside the story, solid, fun and very in-depth yet easy to learn. Kiwami 2 is a remake of the second game whilst the sixth game is the final part ot Kazuma’s story. I’d wholeheartedly recommend these titles to those who either have just got into the whole franchise or are veterans to the Yakuza Franchise. Kiwami 2 is also a remake of possibly the worst part of the series. Pick it up if you love great crime dramas with twists and turns around every exposition dumping corner!

6) Hollow Knight(PS4/XBO/NS/PC) Now, I know it came out in 2017, but I only played this game this year, so it still counts for my list. Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania with a Dark Souls-esque style of worldbuilding and story. The gameplay is a pleasure, and the each zone, each area is both unique to one another yet seamlessly interconnected and not too “wild” in the vein of being out of place. The bosses are both horrifying and cute, same goes for the enemies and NPCs you encounter in the game. The music, the art design and the gameplay are all fantastic, quite possibly my favourite indie title since Pyre. You play as a wanderer that happens upon Hollownest, a small, almost empty little town of critters, below lies a dungeon thwart with danger and a terrible past. Any further, and we are heading into spoiler territory. I hugely implore you to pick this little treat up, you will not regret it at all.

5) Fist of The North Star: Lost Paradise(PS4) From the developers of Yakuza, comes an adaptation of a fantastic little Manga called Fist of The North Star, basically Mad Max but with anime martial arts. You play as Kenshiro, the Successor of Hokuto Shinken, a martial arts style of deading folks. While not a completely panel by panel adaptation and more of a single one shot story using the world and characters of Fist of The North Star, the Yakuza style gameplay really lends itself for adaptations like this. The story could easily be just fanfiction, they really made it something more than fanfiction level fanservice. It’s a really good single story set in it’s own little world. The gameplay holds itself perfectly for this adaptation, with a few added crazy kill techniques that you can level to deal out more damage. Buy it if you are either looking to get into this series, or are a long time fan.

4) Super Smash Bros:Ultimate(NS) The flagship “Not a Fighter” fighting game that started as a Nintendo Legacy series brawler to becoming a huge flagship of a video game legacy brawler. I’ve always adored Super Smash, even the previous one(though it’s not particularly jam-packed with content). Ultimate brings back EVERYONE and even includes some newcomers(Who really should’ve been here since at least Brawl), more content than you can imagine, a reimagined classic mode, a new single player and a fun little collecting system called Spirits, this game is a fanservice love letter, and a big one too. It is worth the price, pure and simple, buy it now!

3) Monster Hunter World(PS4/XBO/PC) I only ever played the first one to completion, tried to get into the 3DS titles and thought “I don’t like it” despite loving the shit out of the monster designs. On a whim, decided to World at launch, and boy was that a fantastic decision. I fucking love this game, from the story(simple but fun) right down to how the monsters are programmed to be as naturally animalistic as they’ve ever been, all the while adding in some old and some new beasties to hunt!. I’ve had fun with friends, on my own, raged at certain monsters(LOOKING AT YOU, BEHEMOTH) and spent hours farming for the material to craft weapons and armors I really want. I’ve spent over a hundred years into this game, and will gladly spend the same in the upcoming expansion! Get this game NOW, you will love it, I assure you!

2) Marvel’s Spiderman(PS4) Spiderman is one of my favourite heroes, he’s grounded, he’s tragic, and he feels like a real person. It would stand that a game based on him, would’ve been a huge success(Spidey 2 was great!, Ultimate and Web of Shadows were really good! The others? Eeeeeeehhhhh not so much). Developed by Insomniac, this return to form for the webslinger is a helluva return! The combat is fluid, fun and fantastic, the story is great whilst the City That Never Sleeps is a nice if pricey expansion. But the webslinging, the bread and butter of any Spidey game, is quite possibly the best, better even than Spidey 2 in my honest opinion. The story is superb, and when *that* scene happens? It will hit you like a ton of bricks. The bosses? Probably the best of this year honestly. This is a must buy for any spidey fan, marvel fan, hell, superhero fan of all kinds!

1) God of War(PS4) Usually, a soft re-imagining can be as well received as a Gary Glitter Comeback Tour, but this one? Boy oh boy, this game is a masterpiece. You play as Kratos, older and wiser since his temper tantrum trilogy in Greece, he’s a father again and now must take the BOI on a journey. I really don’t want to spoil it any further for people who haven’t played it yet. The combat is a great revamp overall(I miss doing juggling combos but eh, the rest of the game is steller), hard hitting and brutal like you’ve known before whilst adding a more personalised flair to it. The soundtrack and audio design is steller, as well as the voice acting. Boy oh boy, the story is fantastic too, following a journey of growth(not just for Atreus) and facing one’s demons, it truly is the highlight of the game. More boss variety could’ve been added, maybe a little more enemy variety too, but these are just minor critiques by the most minor of things. Get this game now, you will enjoy it!

So that’s my list, yes i didn’t include Red Dead 2, haven’t completed it, but I’d gladly do a review once I’m done. Another good year of games has ended, roll on the new year, with another batch of stellar games(I’M LOOKING AT YOU, RESIDENT EVIL 2 REMAKE, DMCV AND HOPEFULLY GHOST OF TSUSHIMA!). Hope you have a happy new years, and had a great Christmas!

#video games #games of the year #games #God of War #spiderman #spiderman ps4 #Marvel Comics #marvel #darksiders #monster hunter #monster hunter world #sony #yakuza #fist of the north star #Dragon Ball Z #dragonball fighterz #nintendo #super mash bros #smash ultimate #hollow knight #digimon #cyber sleuth #metroidvania