Arachne

Been away from Hnet for awhile. It's good to see some familiar faces.
I'm mostly doing pretty well, except I'm still not good at socializing or making plans with friends. Combined with my unusual work schedule (work Friday to Tuesday) it's a little isolating. I've been working a lot, selling insurance.
I got back into playing the oboe a few years ago. Mostly in the local community band, which plays a lot of popular music, but other project pop up as well. I'll be playing parts from Vivaldi's Gloria in a couple weeks, which is pretty scary for me but also exciting.
I've also been playing a lot of Breath of the Wild and various games on my 3DS.
 

I love this

Happy B Day Arachne, where ever you are.

I'm really excited to play this one. It's a good fit for the fun-with-perspective Nintendo has been focusing on to really sell the 3DS graphics. I suspect there won't be a really groundbreaking story in this one, but it's sure to be fun.
I just worry that Nintendo isn't willing to take big chances with their existing franchises this generation, and that they'll just keep recycling ideas from previous titles.

Not sure how many of you have seen this yet.
 
http://youtu.be/Bbsijtx8ij4

Not sure how many of you have seen this yet.
 
http://youtu.be/Bbsijtx8ij4

Not sure how many of you have seen this yet.
 
http://youtu.be/Bbsijtx8ij4

I'm really excited to play this one. It's a good fit for the fun-with-perspective Nintendo has been focusing on to really sell the 3DS graphics. I suspect there won't be a really groundbreaking story in this one, but it's sure to be fun.
I just worry that Nintendo isn't willing to take big chances with their existing franchises this generation, and that they'll just keep recycling ideas from previous titles.

Not sure how many of you have seen this yet.
 
http://youtu.be/Bbsijtx8ij4

Not sure how many of you have seen this yet.
 
http://youtu.be/Bbsijtx8ij4

Yeah, I love Salvatore's SPLIIISH. Played that game more for that alone.

Salvatore from Wind Waker. Y'know, the guy who runs the battleship-style minigame.

SPLOOSH

I've only seen Sonic's decline from an outside perspective. I played the original Genesis games, and I remember rolling my eyes at Shadow the Hedgehog on the shelves. I feel like Sonic is stuck firmly in the 90's, maybe because his main personality shtick was being 'cool'.
In any case, I did pick up Sonic Racing: Transformed and was really impressed. Transformed had a lot of ambition and love put into it, and I may give Generations and Colors a go because of that alone.

I've only seen Sonic's decline from an outside perspective. I played the original Genesis games, and I remember rolling my eyes at Shadow the Hedgehog on the shelves. I feel like Sonic is stuck firmly in the 90's, maybe because his main personality shtick was being 'cool'.
In any case, I did pick up Sonic Racing: Transformed and was really impressed. Transformed had a lot of ambition and love put into it, and I may give Generations and Colors a go because of that alone.

Aethix knows how it's done. I think that's why I liked the level grinding in Disgaea - the game mechanics allowed for faster grinding if you wanted a challenge. Invincibility squares are a godsend, and Geo Panels are also great for getting good items
Realising how the Master/Pupil system worked was a huge eye-opener for me as well. Suddenly my healer was my heaviest hitter. He used the staff so often to heal that he had a lvl 28 proficiency, so when he learned a lvl 1 Fire from his pupil he could torch almost anyone on the board.
Disgaea has a steep learning curve, but I think the sheer depth of the gameplay kept levelling from being monotonous.

I've only seen Sonic's decline from an outside perspective. I played the original Genesis games, and I remember rolling my eyes at Shadow the Hedgehog on the shelves. I feel like Sonic is stuck firmly in the 90's, maybe because his main personality shtick was being 'cool'.
In any case, I did pick up Sonic Racing: Transformed and was really impressed. Transformed had a lot of ambition and love put into it, and I may give Generations and Colors a go because of that alone.

Well, with the original Disgaea, there are certain levels with lots of invincibility panels, so you need to throw enemies into each other to make them fuse together into a stronger enemy, then defeat it from the safety of the invincibility panels. There are also the Statisticians you can get from items that make your characters gain more experience.

This is one of the things that makes Sonic 06's story hard to take...seriously? All the people with normal proportions, as opposed to the occasional cartoony person in past games just felt...jarring. And those romantic undertones between a cartoon hedgehog and a teenaged girl. Very uncomfortable

I tend to group Sonic and Megaman fans together, since they both tend to mainly focus on superfluous character designs and have oddly homogeneous personalities. Sonic being on a lower rung, with a slight layer of autism. I wonder if Sonic '06 is how furries feel IRL. Its drastically contrasting human characters made it extremely apparent that you're a cartoon hedgehog. Maybe Sonic furries feel trapped in a furry body, unable to join humans in society, and the clunky controls represents how unnatural their half-human, not-enough-furry bodies feel to them.
 
I am putting more thought into it than the developers.

Shadow the hedgehog has its share of critics, but it was one of the most inovative games in the series.
 
It was also the first game in the franchise where a Sonic character got to swear. It was an important first step in allowing the Sonic developers to express there creativity with less restrictions, something that had been plaguing the team for years. The Sonic team has gotten a lot of flack for putting out mediocre games, but the truth is that the Sonic team was an incredibly talented and dedicated group of individuals who have had all their best ideas vetoed by the suits upstairs because they involved mature themes.
 
Shadow changed all that.
 
The team finally got the okay to use the word "Damn." It was clear from the get go that the correct use of this word would be pivotal to the success of the game. The team walked a thin line: they had to make sure that they didn't use the word enough to make it sound overused and laughable, but they still had to use it enough to make it clear that Shadow was a badass that should not be f ucked with. It was an incredibly difficult challenge, but as you can see, the devs really stepped up and pushed out a product that did its protaganist justice:
 

 
 
When I played the game, I couldn't put the controller down. I stayed up all night to finish all the different storylines. After I was done, I had only one word would that could describe my thoughts:
"Damn."

The real answer other than yeah, Sonic gets by more on trivial aspects like character design [for some reason], is probably that they became distracted with what kind of series Sonic is supposed to be. I normally wouldn't say that a series' games "aren't what [series] is about", but hear me out; I'm not saying that they weren't sticking to their traditions, but rather, they're not sticking to a purpose at all.
 
Sonic's original main purpose at first was to make games that had a lot of fast-paced forward action. This was impressive at the time because loading levels fast enough to keep up with fast forward movement was something developers couldn't really do with their limited hardware. They made a solid first game and built upon it in each of the sequels, and it they were all about fast-paced platforming, with the occasional sidekick or two. Fast forward a bit, and Adventure did some good stuff with it, and Adventure 2 did away with the hub world, had fast-paced action and slower-paced levels so as to not burn you out, and a pretty solid narrative. The camera never had any problems to my memory. Both games translated Sonic into the 3D realm pretty well; the Homing Attack was a great idea, since the added third dimension made it difficult to just plain jump onto enemies. Then they came out with Sonic Heroes.
 
I had just gotten over my however-many-hours spent in SA2B when I picked up Heroes thinking it would be just as awesome, if not more. The team mechanic somewhat intrigued me, and the narrative, in concept, was actually pretty sweet: a bunch of heroes, all on different but related paths, collide and intersect to eventually take down the villain that's trying to destroy the world, all the while revealing the backstories of each character and learning more about them.
 
There are things that bothered me at first. SA2/B was originally made for the Dreamcast, which I think had a little less graphical power than the Gamecube, so all the characters' shading remained reserved for the most part, relying more on textures than effects, and the prerendered cut scenes weren't all that mind boggling, but it was all consistent. Heroes' character models had this ugly sheen on them at all times. This is more just me rambling but this was my first impression that Heroes is where the decline really happened, so I'll get back to the main point.
 
Anyway, they had this idea that they would put all three completely differing characters together, and each team had a different character that suited the same purpose. This really wrecked the gameplay because of how monotonous it made everything. In some parts, you would have breakneck speed going on, and you'd be on a roll, and then suddenly you'd have to stop to pointlessly punch down a wall, or beat up a bunch of enemies, or fly up a thing. Switching wasn't very fluid at all, and there wasn't a distinct camera setting for the different characters.
 
Sonic always has to look ahead of him, so the camera doesn't have much to do. Knuckles has to be able to turn around easily, and Tails needs a more overhead view because of how he flies. But it was always stuck on the setting they gave to Sonic. I've always hated using Knuckles in any game past SA2/B, because he's also not very fluid at all, since you're required to punch enemies rather than fly into them with your fists out. On the ground, all his punches make you lurch forward and then stop suddenly, so punching someone, then pivoting to punch another someone, in conjunction with the poor camera, was awful. Just generally hard and annoying to do.
 
Tails was eh, alright, but it was just another pointless break in pace to take him out. Even Sonic and his alternatives fell victim to this, though, especially with the tornado attack thing. It's pretty much an attack that forces you to watch Sonic spin around in a painfully slow attack meant for paralyzing enemies or something.
 
The game also wasn't tested very heavily, so the camera would catch on things, which was definitely a problem. The game overall wasn't that bad, but it was a big step down from SA2/B. The decline started when their design started becoming distracted. They had a solid concept to build around, but they weren't skilled enough to make it all work together, or maybe the concept wasn't very solid at all.
 
So we get to Shadow the Hedgehog. More bad design choices. The narrative was a broken mess, (a laughable one at that) that completely ignores all of what happened in Sonic Heroes, centering around a disjointed, nonsensical (sometimes surreal) and painfully edgy story, layered over a game whose level design and design choices were just awful. The game was not about going fast, but maybe they could make that okay? Obviously not: it was sometimes about platforming, but it was mostly an easter egg hunt utilizing these horrible teleportation pads used to revisit previous parts of the map, and gunplay. The fast sections were largely on-the-rail and not exciting. The guns, due to the poor design of the game, were absolutely useless except in places the game forced you to use them. They were clunky, forced, and pointless, as you can still use the Homing Attack, which was actually faster and easier. They also recycled musical themes from SA2/B and had the most awful and stupid multiplayer in recent memory.
 
Then we reach Sonic '06, and they still have no idea what makes a good game. More stupid design choices, like the mach speed segments that had you running all the time, allowing you to get damaged by the environment. I won't rag on this game too much because it's been done enough, and it was supposedly rushed for a holiday release, but so many aspects of it were just butchered abominations mimicking what used to be a decent franchise.
 
They would again make mistakes in Sonic and the Secret Rings, which made another bad design choice; make the whole game a mach speed segment from Sonic '06. I admit it's interesting in concept, but the game was ONLY this. All the time running forward. It got really monotonous, and there weren't any different gameplay segments to keep it interesting or to give me a break. The soundtrack got old really fast, and the world it was set in was really oddly bleak and uninhabited, so it gave me a really uncomfortable feel most of the time. When a game that tests your reflexes becomes monotonous, it becomes really hard to play it at all.
 
I don't really need to get into the other Sonic games. The other big ones being Sonic Unleashed and Sonic and the Black Knight, but I haven't played Black Knight. My point is really just that they made a game with really horrible design decisions that ended up being poorly executed, in games that were rushed out the door, for people who for some reason, still buy them. Sonic '06 was a platinum family hit? Like, what is that.
 
So really it's our fault.
 
But double really it's their fault for not picking a concept, sticking with it, and putting enough thought and effort into it to make it work. The whole game doesn't need to be about one thing (especially not to extremes like Secret Rings), but design choices should be uncluttered and fluid as possible.

its a maid I'm making a maid joke

I honestly can't tell if that's going over your head or not

So, I got System Shock 2 last night, mainly because I heard it was a spiritual predecessor to Bioshock, and I didn't mind Bioshock.
 
I was so unprepared for what came.
 
System Shock 2 is the most terrifying game I've ever played, it genuinely deserves the title "Survival Horror." It isn't really like Dead Space, where you've got heaps of jump scares, but otherwise, feel okay. It isn't like Bioshock, which can have its scary moments, but is much more focused on the story behind Rapture, etc.
 
System Shock 2 just pervades you with an intense feeling of dread, you get scared, you jump at things even when you already KNOW they're gonna be there. The atmosphere is stunning and the audio is genuinely the best I've heard in any game for ages.
 
The game is nearly 14 years old, but it's aged incredibly well.

So did anyone else see an article for it and your first thought was "Another fake zelda game"? I honestly thought this and even after seeing the screenshots, decided to do more research before accepting it. I didn't see the Nintendo conference so I had no idea.
 
Looks great though, glad they moved away from the stylus controls, one of the biggest reasons that I don't like the DS titles.

Ah, seems like a bit of work to do to offer nothing but nostalgia for those who played the original. Maybe use them as some sort of puzzle, or something?