cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45971880

These two lengthy Phantasy Star Online developer interviews originally appeared in the PSO Episode 1&2 Setting Materials book.

Through a little research, I believe RT is the only RPG currently, which is unfortunate because I think it's a great way to soak up the setting.

I have my eye on Mechanicus, because it looks very XCOM influenced. I like the smaller-scale squad-based tactics much more than the army-scale grand strategy/RTS style.

Any other suggestions? I know because of what the original game is, the RTS ones are probably going to be the majority of the PC titles, but there seems to be some representation in just about any genre. I even saw an Ork dogfighting (planes) game.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/46086267

In these interviews, developers from Nintendo and Intelligent Systems discuss the making of the original Paper Mario, an RPG with a unique papercraft aesthetic.

Peter Molyneux, Google DeepMind's Richard Evans, and more on the making and legacy of Black & White as it turns 25.

It's 2007, I'm at home playing this new Sci-Fi RPG my dad got for the Xbox 360. I get lost on uncharted worlds, flip the mako, and blast some aliens.

It's 2017, I've finally bought Mass Effect 2 & 3 and sit down to do a full trilogy playthrough. It's an absolute blast, and I see what everyone was talking about with the Garrus romance.

It's 2026, I've installed countless mods onto the Legendary Edition collection, excited to throw myself back into this universe once again.

To say Mass Effect is ambitious would be an understatement. It doesn't take much for the average player to see the series buckling under the weight of publisher & fan expectations as the games go on. But people love the series for how much it gets right. How the world keeps opening up in new and exciting ways, how small choices can ripple through subsequent games, how the wonder & horror of space is captured at remarkable scale. With the Legendary Edition making EA's scummy DLC practices more or less a thing of the past, it's the best way to experience one of the best Sci-Fi RPGs out there.

For this playthrough, I decided to go all-in with mods. Here are some highlights:

• ME 1 & 3 Diversification Project - I didn't even install this mod til a couple hours into Mass Effect 1 because I was skeptical the new additions would stick out. But honestly, this project is amazing. Female turians are present before ME 3's Omega DLC, all of the species feel more present and feel like a natural part of the experience. I didn't even realize Tali was the only Quarian in ME1 until I installed this.
• MELLO - If you're like me and played ME1 on the 360 you might notice some drastic lighting changes in the remaster. This mod tries to bring back the old lighting and atmosphere from the first game, and largely succeeds.
• Paragade Persuasion - No more arbitrary paragon or renegade playthroughs! Play your Shepard how you'd like in every moment. This mod allows you to choose either Paragon or Renegade persuasion options as long as you have the choice for one of them.
• ME 2 No Paraphrase Mod - Want to actually roleplay dialogue instead of guessing what Commander Shepard will say with a 4-word prompt? This is the mod for you!
• ME 2 Early Recruitment - This mod completely changes the structure of Mass Effect 2 for the better. Many probably already know that the game was split into two discs for consoles, but was originally intended to allow players to recruit any companions in any order. This mod goes above & beyond, allowing you to recruit Legion first if you so choose (like me).
• ME 2 Risky Suicide Mission - Despite some issues I had with the randomness of this mod, it makes the Suicide Mission fun & unpredictable again. I actually had to use strategy when selecting who to bring on main quest missions, along with choosing team leaders during the Suicide Mission.
• ME 3 Expanded Galaxy Mod (EGM) - One of the most popular mods for Mass Effect 3, this one greatly expands the Normandy and Exploration to reflect the state of the galaxy and growing galactic conflict.
• Dreams Remade - Makes some much-needed changes to the dream sequences from Mass Effect 3. Instead of focusing on a random child, the dreams reflect your choices throughout the series, reminding you of what you've lost and have yet to lose.
• Kai Leng Reworked - While I wanted to try Altered Assassin (swaps Kai Leng for either Miranda or Jacob), mod conflicts caused me to use this one. It's pretty good! Kai Leng goes from being an annoying quippy character with infinite plot armor to a menacing figure with mysterious motivations.

Lastly I want to highlight 3 mods that worked together to greatly improve the ending experience of the trilogy for me:

• Take Earth Back - This mod overhauls Priority: Earth to reflect all the allies you've spent the entire game recruiting. It also expands final dialogue with important characters into full conversations, giving a better feeling of closure with Wrex & others.

• Audemus' Happy Ending Mod (AHEM) - While I know many people might be skeptical about a mod that takes away the ending choices from 3, I believe this mod significantly improves the pacing and tone of the final hours of 3. Instead of

  Tap for spoiler

  having a meaningful conversation with Anderson then being thrust into a conversation with a child who gives a last-minute motivation for the Reapers before being forced to choose 3 options ripped straight out of Deus Ex, this mod instead ends Shepard's story with Anderson, as they watch the rest of the galaxy dock the crucible and fire it - destroying the reapers. It shifts Shepard back into being an exceptional soldier, rather than the one person who gets to play God over the galaxy.

• Citadel Epilogue Mod (CEM) - Allows you to play either the entire Citadel DLC or just the party after rolling credits on the main game. Ending with the party & Commander Shepard walking with their companions back to the Normandy was a wonderful way to wrap up this iconic trilogy.

Played Mass Effect recently & want to share your thoughts? Or have any other mods to recommend to folks looking to play the trilogy again? I'd love to hear about it!

Since somebody shared this nice comic about manuals in games in another community, I was thinking about them myself.

My most cherished game manual was the Diablo 2 one. The way they created a little story for each single ability was such an atmospheric wonder and probably started my fascination with lore instead of story. They were also probably the main reason why I took the necromancer and started to feel bored, when necromancer are automatically evil in a setting. Get creative!

My father had Falcon 4.0 and that was "just" a technical manual in itself. 5+ cm thick and full of schematics of the cockpit. I was in awe as a child about the complexity of that thing.

Alternatively, share your favorite mods for CK2, preferably ones that don't rely on DLCs since I have only been playing for a few months and haven't bought any

In case of mods, full overhaul would be ideal, but that's a lot of work, so here's my order of importance:

1. map
2. races
3. religion
4. cultures

I also have vanilla Europa Universalis IV, but I haven't tried it out yet

Another thing worth pointing out: I'm NOT looking for a 4X, I don't like the military / conquer focus of the genre

What I like in CK2:

• micromanaging marriages to (hopefully) get good stats and claims or land
• I can lose a lot without a game over
• personal feel of playing a dynasty instead of a country (but that's okay, too)
• keeping a realm stable and vassals loyal
• "how have I become the king of X?", sometimes caused by forgetting my own plans
• "England, it's the 11th century, you shouldn't be creating a colonial empire yet!" - probably won't apply to a fantasy world, but I think it's still worth mentioning
• staying alive is simple enough to try funny plans, like turning Byzantine Empire heretic
• interesting achievements
• working native Linux version
• overall interpersonal relationship management

After seeing my friend play Victoria III and Europa Universalis V, I think I'd enjoy a game with a more economic focus. I'll probably buy EU5 if it gets a fantasy mod with world generator, but that's probably gonna take a looong while.

Can somebody remind me why I might have downloaded this? I'm sure it must have been pitched to me somewhat effectively already but I really can't remember what made me get it or why I never got around to playing it.

Edit: okay turns out this is the remake that just came out. I'm guessing I acquired this after having watched Ben Croshaw's review of the old one. Or seeing that it was being remade and remebering the old one being something he spoke well of

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/44266132

Join us as we discuss the cult racer, Rollcage, its impact on the late-90s gaming landscape, and its legacy.

I jumped into TTYD recently after playing some other notable timing-based RPGs (Clair Obscur, Super Mario RPG) and having a blast with those. I know it's a really beloved game that isn't known for it's difficulty, but I'm about "eight hours" (minus deaths) in at Chapter 2, stuck at the Shadow Sirens boss fight, and am finding it to be a really hard game.

There's been several occasions where I make significant progress in a dungeon and then get defeated by regular enemies and lose a lot of progress after making enough timing mistakes.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong with my character builds. Overall, I feel like HP, FP, and BP are all bottomless pits, and no matter what I put points into, I never have enough of any resource. Right now, I'm level 7 with 10 HP, 15 FP, and 15 BP. Not enough health to have an error margin, not enough FP to use abilities much at all, and being introduced with a staggering number of badges without the points to equip even half of them.

The lack of a consistent healing ability is also a bit annoying. Sweet Treat is tied to SP, puts you into a minigame, and isn't a consistent way to get HP back. And I haven't encountered a game with more restrictive item management since Mother 1 on the NES. I think the challenge there is the number of enemies impervious to regular abilities, so (I think) you have to always have POW Blocks and Fire Flowers to deal with them instead of more mushrooms.

Koops and Goombella aren't very good allies at the start either. Multiple boss fights so far have been multiple enemies, so I'm fairly worn down by the time Goombella is done Tattling them all. So that's why I'm stuck at the Shadow Sirens.

In regular encounters, I'm consistent about dodging and stylish moves with Mario, and am decent at Superguarding. Getting the timings right in boss fights, though, can be tough because if I die, it's all the way back to the save point, so not many consistent opportunities to practice. And very little margin for error.

A lot of people online say TTYD is easy, and they're probably right. Are there any experienced players here who can point me in the right direction?

And thank you, Eric!

Which game have you been the most patient for (as in, delaying purchase)?

For me, it would have to be GTA V. I stopped playing games for years, then built a new rig in 2018. Since then I've played through GTA IV (well, I beat the story, and it was amazing), but I never played GTA V.

My plan is to purchase it and start playing it the day GTA VI is released, as I have enough other games to get through in the meantime.

Crossposted from https://reddthat.com/post/60858776

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/59611938

First, let me say that I don't play turn-based strategy games. I'm not a fan of them and also I'm terrible at them. But I am a sucker for cyberpunk and this is Shadowrun so I felt like I should at least try. So I had bought the first two games (Returns and Dragonfall) around the time they released and then... never actually played them. To be fair, I tried playing Dragonfall once, died on the first mission, and gave up. Ten years later (about a month ago), the third game was on sale so I decided to buy it and give the entire trilogy another shot. This time I was able to beat all three games. And now it's time for me to ramble about my thoughts.

I will say that the first game (Returns) was definitely the most janky. I got soft-locked multiple times where an animation would play for the enemy phase and then the game just... wouldn't give control back to me. There were also times where I'd be in the Matrix, walk through a portal, and the game just... wouldn't do anything. And then sometimes I'd Alt+Tab to look at a walkthrough, then Alt+Tab back into the game, and it'd crash. In every case, reloading my last save would work but there were a lot of times where I had forgotten to save for awhile and ended up replaying more than I would've wanted. Overall though, the story here was my favorite of the three.

When I moved on to Dragonfall this time (after my shameful rage-quit a decade ago) I discovered that the first mission was an ambush that you were supposed to fail. Oops. The problem was that all members of your team had to escape (for plot reasons) so the goal was to run away with all members surviving. I hadn't realized that on my first playthrough because every time I lost a single character I'd get a "mission failed". So I had been trying to beat a mission that was designed for me to lose. After finally escaping that first mission, the rest of the game wasn't too bad. They fixed a lot of the jank from the first game so I never had any issues with soft-locks or crashing. Personally though, I wasn't a fan of the story this time around. This might just be me, but I don't think Shadowrun games should have "save the world" storylines. The story was fine, it just had too high of stakes in my opinion. The stakes can be personal to the team, but I don't think it should be world-ending. Others might disagree with me though; I'm no expert on Shadowrun.

The third game, Hong Kong, had some amazing improvements over the first two games. The Matrix sections in this one were really fun because there were now IC Watchers with a vision cone that you could actually avoid. So rather than being forced into combat, you could sneak past IC and keep your detection levels low. I liked that. Again though, the stakes in this game were even higher than the last one. More "end of the world" stuff. Also, maybe I was just tired after playing these three games back-to-back but I didn't care to read all of the lore and talk to all of the characters in this one. It probably deserved more than I gave it.

In the end, I had a good time with the entire trilogy. I set all three games to Easy mode this time (which I probably wouldn't have done a decade ago) and I was able to beat all three. It was definitely a struggle though.

I do recommend picking up any of these three games when they go on sale. Just be sure to save often in that first game. And hopefully you're better at turn-based combat than I am. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/26635/Shadowrun_Trilogy/

One last thing... Each game has its own Workshop of free user-generated content on Steam and someone recreated the entire Shadowrun SNES game in the Dragonfall engine. I'm seriously tempted to give that a try despite being terrible at these games.

Dude, Where Is My Beer? is a point and click aventure in which you play a middle aged man who just wants to drink a normal pilsner. At the beginning of the game you arrive in Oslo per bus and want to use your beak time to get a cold beer. But it gets clear relatively quickly that everyone in this damn city is young and hip and drinks fancy craft beers. At first that sounds like a fun game, but is it? (tl;dr I don't think so)

It's a relatively short game that (obviously) focuses on its humor. But there are two major flaws with this game:

First: The humor. This game makes fun of hipster tropes and the culture of different kinds of bars. I thought I would like that. But after only 15 minutes I thought it was just annoying. It just feels like it's just the same joke on repeat over and over and over. You get in a bar, you ask for a pilsner, the bartender says you are old and unhip and offers you beers the wildest of names. There are multiple different bars that represent different tropes of drinking culture. A sports bar, a bar with some pub quiz going on, ... It feels like all forms of this joke has already been told before the game was released. It got dull way to early for the game to be fun.

Second: Speaking of fun, let's get to the gameplay. It's a point and click, a genre notorious for it's weird puzzles that reach to the point of being basically unsolvable without just mindlessley just clicking everything. And for me, this game is just this. I played on normal difficulty where it is possible to get some hints. But those hints are often missing if you are already in the middle of a puzzle without knowing. Or the hint is "just explore more". And this is the most frustrating thing about this game. In most adventures when you solve a puzzle you get some kind of clue or item which leads to the next puzzle. That's barely the case in this game. Lete give you an example: A woman needs a pen. So you try to find a pen. Some puzzle solving later you give her the pen and what happens? She just starts a phone call. That's it. No reward, no real interaction, nothing. So what are you doing next? Explore the whole map again and see if something changed. The game is too often completely unresonsive to your actions, I found it rather frustrating. At some point I just opened the guide if it took too long to find out what I have to do next.

That's my review/rant about Dude, Where Is My Beer? Has anyone else played it and a similar experience? Or do you disagree with me? And what is your favorite beer?

Ah, and before I forget, the positive things about this game: The soundtrack was okay, I guess? It did not get annoying in 4,5h of playtime? Also,... nah, I think that's it.

EDIT: i should've mentioned that the actual game is wii fit!!

i didn't think much of it when it came out, but i never woulda thought it could be this effective. its too bad this kind of game didn't get bigger?