putting this in my back pocket and front pocket and breast pocket and also above my upper lip
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: i think playing with friends around helped train us out of this
When a friend is around to commisserate with/riff off of/occasionally hug/generally goof around with, it takes the edge off a lot, especially if they also play and laugh with you at their own deaths/failures
Its the cheetah thing, right? You are the anxious cheetah who alone drives itself up a wall on accident, and your friend is the calm dog who you look to and go “oh, they arent freaking out, i guess everything’s ok actually”
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Okay Level 9 is kicking my ass again, this is the one level so far where I’m playing as Trevor over any of the others (although tbh I’m not sure I’d want to redo those last few with Grant, and I’m not even totally sure where to find Alucard. I assume I take the bottom path, through the swamp, at the second branch, instead of going top for Sypha?) not because his increased reach gives him a unique advantage, or because his subweapons have a better trajectory for the way the level is designed, but just because it means I can take an extra hit or two. Doubly so because I can’t even get any subweapon drops except by farming the fleamen that get dropped off by the eagles, when the part where I’d WANT those weapons happens after a checkpoint, so I only get one chance to even use them regardless
Mad Donkey: "I know what you are 
"
Lies of P actually is not only a pretty good game, but has a few details that just reinforce my belief that every other developer makes better Souls games than FROM. When you rest and select the Teleport option, the game will display icons next to certain spots if there’s a quest you can deliver or new NPC dialogue. Just moments before, I had gotten a key item that I didn’t really know what to do with, but as soon as I checked this screen that icon was next to a location, and it reminded me of an NPC I had talked to before, and that he was looking for something a friend left; so I went there and used the item next to him, and got the end of the quest. Just a simple, yet brilliant, little design choice to make small stories less of a headache.
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I 'm playing Golden Sun on my Anbernic, but it keeps crashing after a certain fight. a thread online is saying I need to change the OS to Garlic, but I’m thinking of trying to just try using Retroarch and see if it fares better.
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Anbernic doesn’t take garlic anyways
Probably a core issue but I’d need to know the actual bug to dig further
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It’s in the mercury lighthouse. I find the Mercury Djinn and fight it. After I win. The djinn joining animation will play for a while, but then the game crashes and anbernic goes back to the game selection menu.
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in slightly better now playing news. I’ve beaten 3 of the four baseball teams in yakuza 6. After baseball, I only have to pull two more baddies, and make friends with everyone in new gaudi before I can square up with Amon.
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Oh wait I’m an idiot, yeah swap to garlicOS because it’s better firmware anyways if you can, otherwise see what core is being used, I find mGBA most consistent.
All that said, you should run everything out of retroarch anyways if you’re using the base firmware. I’ll try to remember how you do that it’s pretty easy
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There’s a very odd assertion that a lot of people make that being really cryptic about quests (or anything, really) is like. A good thing. It was an interesting choice at one point and that point was about 15 years ago. The scope of quests in these games has since ballooned to the point that it’s just kind of annoying the way they do things in the Souls games (and by extension Elden Ring) but now it’s the Brand, so, welp
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: honestly its not even cryptic, cryptic implies they give you hints at all
Im remembering the quest in ER to get the funky golden needle and how much of that was just “find this brown and red colored NPC in obscure locations in our brown and red colored world with no guidance” as an example
Theres 0 way to figure them out, organically or otherwise, which i think goes from ‘cryptic’ to ‘opaque and poorly designed’
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Yeah it’s more just like. A callback to the “buy the strategy guide, idiot” era.
In the abstract I like the idea of expecting people to collaborate on figuring out things but like…in practice that’s just going to turn into datamined shit immediately. Let me turn on “don’t have time for this ‘uncle who works at fromtendo’ shit mode” and just be told what’s up.
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I’m back on Caves of Qud, a lot. Reached the (an?) ending on Roleplay mode. I even beat the turbo fucked up new 7th superboss that you only get if you go out of your way a bunch before a certain point in the main story. …after like 15 attempts, ngl. Shit’s rough.
Now I’m back on roguelike mode trying to see if I can repeat that feat without a safety net, and then explore a different potential ending.
You get a ton of lore in the new part of the main quest that puts a neat bow on a lot of stuff, honestly. Having seen it all from start to finish now, you can really tell there’s like 15 years of difference between the beginning and end of the game.
You can clearly tell they started out making “just another nethack/crawl/angband” and then the exact point where they started making Qud instead.
And we’re closing in on the end of Umineko. I have thoughts about it, but I’m not gonna dump them here for now because it’s spoilers all the way down.
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Mind you, I’m okay with cryptic, depending of the applications. I enjoy being thrown into a foreign world and having to figure out what the terms being used mean, what made people become this way, what are the norms and such. Most recently, that was a thought I had involving 1000xRESIST in regards to what feels better, getting some exposition or just playing and trying to piece things together. I’m 100% on the side of learning what the words in this setting mean fucking around.
I also feel Elden Ring in particular was an interesting progress in not being as punitive, since IIRC its the first game where you can join every single faction without being locked out of others, basically getting all possible endings and only having to choose which one you prefer when you get past the last boss. There’s still some frustrating aspects - and most of my particular dislike of the game comes out of the entire open-world, but there’s some marginal improvements here and there.
Mind you, Lies of P is 100% drinking that juice when it comes to certain particulars; the stats in the game, for example, are absolutely wacky and, to my knowledge, you can’t even do that FROM ‘help’ where it tells what each of them does. Having played other games of the type, I can reasonably guess that “Motivity” is Strength, “Technique” is Agility, and “Advance” is Arcane, but even then I wish I could read more.
With that said, a few more stray thoughts on stuff I’ve been enjoying about Lies of P as a Souls-like:
- There’s no stat requirement to wield a weapon. You get better at it if you have the attributes it scales from, but you can just equip whatever and use it.
- Fashion Souls is separate from equipment. The gears (literally) that give you stats aren’t visible, while you can pick the clothing you want to wear freely.
- When you stagger a boss or large enemy, the game highlights a red circle in front of it where you have to stand to deal the Fatal Attack, instead of you having to guess how you have to face it to do it
- When you die in a boss room, your Ergo (experience) gets dropped on the outside area (still could do without this mechanic, but baby steps)
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I’ve been slowly coming around on the fact that just focusing on Dracula’s Curse and Lament of Innocence to the complete exclusion of other games was limiting my ability to really enjoy either of them, and last night that reached a breaking point. Went through Phantasy Star II: Nei’s Adventure, with a guide, and had a lot of fun. Think I’m gonna have to pause LoI and play those, plus PSII proper. It was really short, and the progress gates could be a little finnicky to figure out at times, but the guide smoothed things along well enough (despite SPOILING THE MAIN TWISTS BEFORE ACTUALLY SHOWING THE WALKTHROUGH). Definitely wanna do them all now, considering they’re so short, and add so much character. There were even some fun cameos from some of the other party members!
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actually totally get this now. Very annoying how special moves are locked behind town building
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I tried playing golden sun again with my save right before the djinn fight and the problem sorta fixed itself. The djinn is in my party despite my save being right before i fight it.
I’ll take it. I didnt really wanna have to get wacky with transferring savestates from native emulation to Retroarch
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Also god, golden sun is such a slog. Dialog, movement, dungeons, and puzzles. I dont mind puzzles, but the fact that i have to do them again if im backtracking is annoying. I feel like even with limited gba memory that shouldnt be an issue.
On the bright side, i finished all the baseball games in Yakuza 6 yesterday, so the only thing between me and Amon is pulling two more hostesses and doing one more bar substory.
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Yeah I have a lot of vibes-based fond feelings for Golden Sun as a thing with an actual pretty good Sakuraba soundtrack and some really gorgeous sprite environments but whenever I consider giving it a replay thinking about the pace of it for 1 second discourages me. Playing it on good ol VBA back in the day with fast forward I still never finished it, and Lost Age is even more menacing with the open ended sections on a way too massive world map…
… Typing all that out the little “maybe it would be fun to replay” tingle still activated in my brain though. Nothing is more powerful than the magnetism of media you were intrigued by as a kid.
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