melkathi

Played some more Stranger of Sword City. I farmed and farmed and finally managed to survive the intro / tutorial part of the game. I even killed the chocolate thief Mukabu the Third. I am now running through the second dungeon, a maze like forest, and I have already forgotten what useful information the npcs there told me.

Started playing Stranger Of Sword City. I may not be the target audience for this. The loot is ranked F,E,D,C,B,A and probably S. You hunt boss monsters all over the place. There is unique equipment. Which you can feed to a Mimic named Mumic so the item gets removed from your inventory and returned into the loot table with new stats. You probably are supposed to farm for hours. Definitely not the target audience for this game. But you can import custom images for your party, so I could theoretically have a whole party of Teddy Bears...

It is enjoyable. I found it refreshing that all the followers are just people and don't try to become more Morte than Morte. But one playthrough is enough to see everything the game has to offer.

No difficulty setting

I found the constant backtracking in Mars War Logs a bit annoying so never finished it. And since I didn't finish War Logs I haven't played Technomancer since I first want to finish War Logs. Maybe I should simply play that...

Question: Would I enjoy Greedfall? I see it on sale.

The final boss has this stupid ability where they AOE your whole party and reduce them all to 1 HP and apply Burn, killing them with the DOT the moment they activate. The solution: put necklaces on everyone that makes them immune to Burn. But then the boss does a double attack instead of the Burn, setting everyone's HP to 1 and then insta-hitting them again. Possibly, with a perfectly timed parry you can prevent the second hit. But if you are slightly off, party wipe. Avoiding that attack though is all there is to this boss. He has no interesting mechanic - just a party wipe attack ever so often. Before that, the toughest fight that people get stuck on actually has a tactic you need to figure out. It's a boring fight because once you know what you need to do, it is simply longish, but it has a "Oh, so that's what I am supposed to do" moment. I was fine with the QTEs in Last Remnant, where it was simply about getting a better effect on the attack and every now and then avoiding some damage. But there never was a "don't hit the button on time and you lose" moment. Cris sadly has that. If they killed two out of three characters, that would be fine. It would put you in a crummy situation, but you'd be struggling to rebound from it.

Cris Tale ~ a game melkathi uninstalled at the very final boss fight: Cris Tale is a jrpg thingie with theoretical old school turn based combat with... QTEs. The basic concept is great: you are a young girl... or teenager? A girl in one of those worlds where it is normal that adults stand by as children do the fighting (so possibly the Sudan). Anyway, you are a girl who as it turns out is a Time Mage. Time Magic is a neat idea: When you walk around a city the screen is split into three parts. In the centre are you in the present. Everything to your left you see in the past. Everything to your right in the future. If you run along an NPC, you'll see them in past, present and future. Similarly you will see the state of the city. As you do quests, you may see the result of your actions in the future. You even have the ability to affect the past and future that you see. So there may be a loot chest in the future, so you grab the loot that will be in the location eventually. Of course that is a bit of a paradox, but okay. It allows for a few puzzles, as you for example plant a seed in the past so you can have the grown plant in the present. Sadly these interactions are not as numerous as you'd want from a game where time is such an integral part of everything. During combat you can use time crystals. As your party is in the middle of the screen, enemies on your left can be sent to the past, while enemies on the right to the future. If you inflict a DOT (poison or fire) on an opponent and then send them forward in time, they will instantly suffer all DOT at once. If you send someone back in time, they may lose all status effects affecting them. And most importantly, their stats will change and they may even use different abilities. Early on, as the game teaches you these things, there will be a boss battle. Here you can't damage the boss until you cast water magic on the shield, then send them into the future for the shield to rust. It is a great interaction. Sadly, while you are shown this in the first 10 minutes of the game, no clever use of time crystals will happen in the rest of the game. Other bosses are either unaffected by time magic, or they simply change stats a bit. Maybe in the future you have to do a few hundred damage less, but often that is the extent of how the fight is affected. So it is a gorgeous game, made with a lot of love, but where the devs seem to have exhausted their concept during the tutorial and then found them selves having to follow it up with a whole game. If it weren't for the QTEs, I'd say give it a go because it is cute. But the final boss instakills you if you don't get the timing of your parry 100% right, and if I wanted to see my time wasted like that, I'd play Elden Ring like the rest of you.

I have reached the final boss battle in Cris Tales. I hate this battle. Maybe I should just watch the ending on youtube.

Did you get as far as changing gender from male to female so your **** drops off and you can sell it at the trading post?

I considered buying Cultivation Simulator, seeing how it is on sale, but it is a Chinese mythology theme, which should mean that Keyrock would be all over it. But he isn't. So I am worried.

Maybe he won't notice the game will be about teddy bears in Morocco...

Field Hockey 5?

You can always drop me a line. But I don't know if I'll be the right fit.

There is a 48 hour giveaway for Iris and the giant. Don't know it. It's free.

New chaos gate looks good. Not sure I feel like paying more to get it early before the inevitable bug fixes and dlc.

For a musical game I found the audio of the trailer very uninspiring.

One day there'll be a game called: The valley everyone knew was there all along

Yeah, better hush hush

All I know is that to me it looks like you'll be having fun

Mind you, Dokken didn't rock all that much. Warlock rocked much rockier than that. But I guess rokken like Dokken is catchier than roro like Doro...

I didn't know we were talking about good games.

I liked the first DOW. It was a good, fast paced RTS. I disliked the second, mostly because it might as well had a completely different name. It had nothing to do with the first other than the 40K IP, so why called it "2", other than to trick people into buying it based on their liking of the first game. I disliked the third because it simply is a bad game.

Wrapping up Cris Tale. I'll post complete thoughts when I'm done or bored.

Whoah! Someone hacked Alan's account and is posting as him!