🎶 Assassin’s Creed is a good franchise 🎶

Yeah, I thought this was dope.

We don’t have enough good Kaiju games, IMO. Inaba robbed us of Project G.G. or Kamiya messed up, IDK. But they need to work it out and finish that project at some point.

Maybe Clovers can buy the IP if Okami 2 is a hit, who knows. I doubt Platinum would mind.

Having to grovel to lower the difficulty in God Hand.

Right, and for their next trick they’re gonna break the all-time sales record with GTA6 because no one gives a fuck and evil is just OK now.

I wish they start supporting regional pricing and more currencies.

I can confirm: I grew up playing Ninja Gaiden and now I have a lot of i-frames whenever I jump forward. It’s wild, I know.

There was a shootout in my neighborhood the other day and I jumped through it, didn’t care.

“Making games with AI” sounds like hell… like this is what hell must be.

Sitting there prompting AI, getting shitty ass results, prompting it again and again until you eventually settle for slightly less shitty results. The frustration and the loss of agency… oh God, someone should make a psychological horror about this: a frustrated artist forced to ditch their skills and tools and use AI to bring their unique vision to life, and throughout the film you watch them descend deeper and deeper into madness and depression until they burn down a data center and laugh manically as it disintegrates around them.

Bruh, I still haven’t bought the first game because I don’t wanna give money to Microsoft… now I won’t buy the sequel because I don’t wanna give money to Krafton. Madness.

See, this is why I think the comparison doesn’t work. They may be called UTs and function the same as they do in NGB, but enemies behavior is different. If my only strategy is UT spamming regardless of context, I’ll get my teeth kicked in because enemies are too aggressive, volatile, and while they’re not as tanky as they are in NGB, they attack in larger numbers.

Timing is also key if I aim to use essence to instant charge UTs/OL UT. I windrun at the wrong time, and enemies will hunt me down because their tracking is also ridiculous, never mind suicide runs.

All that space between UTs is not exactly a walk in the park and there’s so much to be aware of and get right before you can reliably pull them off to the extent that undermines difficulty in a game where one mistake can easily snowball into a good chunk of your health gone.

The problem is all the absolute nonsense in the game, and the abundance of pretty much garbage levels. I think like half the levels in the game are outright bad.

I don’t think it has more garbage levels than Bayonetta or The Wonderful 101, for example. Like 3 or 4 bad levels? Predominantly where you have water, bow and arrow, and bullshit enemy behavior/checkpoint placement segments.

Most bosses suck in both games, and in most action games, TBH. I don’t understand why they’re hellbent on serving us giant monstrosities. Action games need more humanoid bosses overall.

Also stuff like how completely broken UTs are. It’s obvious the game wasn’t fully playtested and balanced, and so the super powered UTs were slapped on as a bandaid. But they’re not really fun to use and end result is a mechanic that you at best feel forced to resort to just to get through levels, but most of the time try to actively avoid using in order to actually have fun.

How are they broken? You absolutely have to earn using them and be strategic about it. Enemies will mess you up if you misuse OTs on higher difficulties.

IME, most action games feel messier than they actually are on the first playthrough and the more you replay them, the more patterns start to emerge and first playthrough issues fade.

Now, if you didn’t enjoy the first playthrough enough to go back for more that’s fair, and a rather big risk these games typically take.

From the shit Flying Swallow to the nonlinear level design, my issue with NGB is it’s less committed to being an action game.

To me, NG2 is 3D Ninja Gaiden finding and accepting what it is: a brutal action game where nothing matters but combat interactions. Level design and balance be damned: it’s combat, combat, and more combat.

In that way NG2 is one of the most unique games out there. I can maybe liken it to God Hand, but NG2’s commitment to nonstop combat is so singularly deranged.

For that same reason I always found it difficult to compare them because they clearly set out to achieve different goals. It just happens that what NG2 tried to do is exactly what I need as an action game fan.

Ninja Gaiden Black, actually. I was watching the Combat Overview video on it, and it made me realize I never really gave it a fair shake because I prefer NG2 by a lot.

BTW, if you in any way like action games, do yourself a favor and follow Combat Overview on YT. No one does what this guy has been doing for last couple of years, sadly. It’s been my go-to channel for long form breakdowns of action games since matthewmatosis shifted focus to making his game and TGBS moved on from making videos covering action games altogether.

Football Manager

God, I don’t miss sinking time into this monstrosity. Biggest time drain in existence.

I hate this so much because I love em dashes and have been using them forever.

I think it could be useful in edge cases and the user needs to be skilled at whatever they’re using it for.

Reality is it is predominantly used by rich assholes to cut corners and get around hiring and paying workers.

Thank you for putting this together.

Consensus seems weak environmental design, mediocre graphics, and awesome combat—more Platinum than TN, which fans more or less predicted from the pre-release footage. As a Platinum fan myself, I don’t mind that, but I see why this can annoy the Itagaki faithful.

I’ve seen Steam reviews bring up some performance issues most critic reviews didn’t, but apart from that, I’m satisfied with the reception enough to add it to my wishlist. It’s such a nice feeling knowing there’s a new action game waiting to be bought and played. We don’t get to experience this feeling nearly enough.

Hopefully, Onimusha and Okami 2 will follow suit and we’ll get a DMC6 announcement soon.

From Software could kill the entire soulslike genre with one lawsuit. Like, just pick the biggest non-From Software soulslike and sue the publisher.

Hellsinker.

I kept hearing it’s a “one-of-a-kind shmup” and it’s a “shmup that somehow plays like an action game”, so I tried it twice and couldn’t see why it’s praised.

Third time I was like “OK, ima read the manual, read guides, and give it one final shot.” and holy shit, what a game. I’ll probably be playing it forever, TBH.

Up there with Crimzon Clover World EXplosion for me now.

This was years ago so I’m not sure, but I remember I got to a sand planet.

There’s a 21-hour full playthrough on YT by a channel called Lacry, I got to hour 8~9.

I watched all the Star Wars movies and I actually enjoy them, but I’m not a die hard fan so a lot of the lore was not interesting to me. My biggest issue was the combat though: it did not grip me at all.

I prefer much faster paced games overall.

If the announced remake is a fast-paced action game, I may give it a shot.

I feel like this shit is cyclical. Like, we’ve been here before and we’ll be here again.

The question is: are we ever going to evolve past this nonsense before we go extinct. Historically speaking, the answer has always been “probably not”

We’re just getting closer and closer to the end so it’s more frightening now, I feel.