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Bastion had a similar thing. In the ending, you can use the eponymous Bastion to reverse time to before the apocalypse - it does turn back time, but not quite far enough, and you come back to the protagonist waking up after it happened, at the very beginning of the game. You also have another option for the ending, where you don't do that. I haven't messed around enough to know if it means you just don't unlock NG+.
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Feb 19, 2016 23:51
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Jesus Christ, that sure was a tonal shift.  Content: Not sure if it's a small thing, but I really like emeras, the new addition to Super Mystery Dungeon. They're passives that you find in dungeons and can equip on your party, but they only last for the current exploration. Most of them seem to be based on the old IQ skills and some do really good things, like let you randomly use a skill twice in a row or reflect status effects on your enemies. In other words, you get a part of the same experience you get in any other roguelike, when any equipment and items (I guess the closest analogy is rings) are generated by the RNG and you have to make do with what you get. It really adds to the game's variety. If you get a redundant or unnecessary emera, you can burn them for a stat boost lasting until the dungeon's end. Oh, right - when they're on the ground, they also break in a certain amount of turns after you enter a room that has them, so this encourages you to move forward rather than tank up in the corridor, somewhat like Meld containers from XCOM. This adds a bit of a risk/reward component to them. In general, the entire mechanic is just full of little design things. The devs really wanted these items to help you or enhance your experience in every possible scenario. 
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Feb 22, 2016 11:59
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Xythe posted:With Pokegirls chat happening right before this it took me 3 rereads to realize this is not what you said They corrupt everything. 
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Feb 22, 2016 12:09
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That brings me to an actual small thing: Oran Berries, the main healing item, now not only heal you to full, but also give you some 10 temporary HP that lasts until the end of the exploration. This is a lot, normal max HP for my level being 50-60. Thanks to this, you can't actually be caught in a loop of getting damaged, healing and never getting to do anything. (Granted, if an enemy does most of your HP in damage in one round, you're probably screwed anyway unless you have status ailments or they keep missing.) And yeah, being unable to evolve is a big pain. I chose a Mudkip because I wanted to be able to sling Earthquakes around, but it turns out only the evolutions can learn it and a lot of other powerful Ground moves. 
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Feb 22, 2016 17:24
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He should just charge through and leave a Looney Tunes-esque, Drake-shaped hole in the wall
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Feb 22, 2016 23:49
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Kingdom of Loathing is full of little things and absurdist jokes. Such as the alliterative main stats (Muscle, Moxie and Mysticality) and the million item descriptions.Accordion Thief's starting weapon description posted:This is an accordion, which you stole from someone, you big jerk. Then again, you're keeping someone from playing the accordion, which somewhat balances the negative moral aspects of the theft. The game has a quest where you have to cross a wide pit. You do that by dismantling an abridged dictionary into a dictionary and a bridge, which you walk across.
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Feb 27, 2016 02:24
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LawfulWaffle posted:I'm really enjoying my time with Stardew Valley, and I think my favorite little thing is the hearts that pop out of the animals when you interact with them. There's no animation of a pet or a hug, just a heart in a word bubble, but man if that doesn't make me smile. I don't think it affects anything in game, but it's really important to me that I pet my dog and stroke my That's how it was in Harvest Moon, too. Glad to see they kept some things from the spiritual predecessor. In Harvest Moon, this affected egg/milk/wool/whatever quality and, more importantly made your dog run after you and want to play with you for longer.
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Mar 11, 2016 20:02
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Xoidanor posted:Most of the complaints seem to be made by people not realizing that their workplace is in loving Poland. I work in external QA in Warsaw and it seems we're still paid better than CD Projekt QA. Not by much, but still a fair bit above minimum wage, which one of these reviews specifically mentions. Living in Poland is no excuse for treating your employees like poo poo, and CD Projekt in particular should really know better.  Content: in Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon, any Pokemon you complete a quest for can join your party. But sometimes you can just talk to a 'mon chilling in a town, they thank you for taking the time to talk with you, and you make a new friend just like that. This happens even with some strong ones, I think I got a Blaziken this way.
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Mar 12, 2016 21:27
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RareAcumen posted:I like how weapon effects make people scream themselves to death in Borderlands. Fire weapons make them flail around screaming, shock weapons make them seize before falling over, corrosive ones melt them like they're you dying in Dark Souls not even leaving a corpse behind. Shin Megami Tensei IV pulls something similar off with sprites. Kill an enemy with fire magic, they burn away, cast ice magic, they turn to ice before shattering, use a gun, they are filled with bloody holes before disappearing, use non-elemental magic and they just disintegrate.  Also from SMTIV: your protagonists come from a society that's basically stuck in the feudal era, but you visit a post-apocalyptic city soon enough. When you find "artifacts", which just means various pieces of modern junk, you can bring them to a trader who will appraise and buy them for decent money. That's not a small thing, that's a game mechanic. But all of those items have their own short descriptions, written from the point of view of your backwater protagonists. An SD card? "It looks like it might be a dragon scale." 
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Mar 20, 2016 15:54
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Strategic Tea posted:Whereas the Witcher is Eastern European as gently caress in all the right ways I can't really compare since I don't have a non-Polish perspective on it, but I gotta say, it felt really reassuring when I read the saga (and again when I played the games) to see that the magical swordmaster superman struggles with crapsack reality about as much, if not more, than any other person. I'm actually surprised there are so many people familiar with the whole thing in this thread, especially since afaik, there still isn't an official English translation. Glad to see it getting around anyway.  Content: Stellaris is still not quite perfect, but not for the lack of good random events. Here's my science ship trying to make sense of a Russell's teapot. 
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May 29, 2016 22:18
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Yes, it is! I was actually pretty anxious because I hadn't played a Paradox strategy game and they're kind of notorious, but Stellaris's basic mechanics are fairly simple, about on par with, say, Master of Orion 2. Diplomacy in particular is disappointingly straightforward, but I think that's one of the things they want to improve in future patches. Of course, that's a mechanical gripe, events are still gold. Have an unrelated anomaly going wrong.  "Unfortunate" is a stock response for bad events, but here in particular it's ice cold.
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May 29, 2016 23:00
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BioEnchanted posted:By the way, question about Witcher Lore. Are the Witcher's mistaken about the mutations taking away their emotions, because it seems like it more just suppresses them. Geralt definitely feels quite a bit, not just towards Yennifer and Triss but when he finds Whoreson Junior he definitely is being emotional in his decisions to beat him to a pulp. I don't know about the games, but in the books it's at one point mentioned, when Geralt overheard Yennefer's sorceress frenemies talking about him, that "he was very glad that a mutation of blood vessels prevented him from blushing". Might be that the witchers come across as cold monsters to the general populace and that they themselves just repeat this as a self-loathing joke. e: beaten like a ghoul
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Jun 8, 2016 05:20
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Out of curiosity, do they say why that is? I would've thought a dragon would be high on a Witcher's "poo poo I gotta murder at least once" list. Geralt met a dragon once in the short stories and it was a bro. I don't recall if he gave any better justification then, though.
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Jun 8, 2016 18:45
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timp posted:Fallout 4 execution I had something similar-ish happen in Skyrim. I used one-handed maces extensively, so I took the perk that boosted mace damage a bit and "allowed decapitations with maces", which I took for a lazy perk description, because the axes and swords perk had the exact same text with only the weapons changed. An hour or so later, enough to completely forget about the perk, I'm investigating murders in Windhelm and find out that the murderer is about to kill his next victim at the marketplace! I easily pick out the one creep sneaking around, start shadowing him, and strike him from behind with my mace. My character takes a swing and takes his head clean off his shoulders. The crowd's reaction to me inventing Nord Baseball? "Better him than me." Indeed.
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Jun 30, 2016 00:14
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MeatwadIsGod posted:The alert sound is just perfect. It instantly makes you stand at attention. I know some people who use it as a text notification noise, and I don't know how they don't have sweaty palms all day long. You get used to it after a while. I had it as my notification tone for a time and now I just look around for my phone whenever I hear somebody play MGS. 
Aithon has a new favorite as of 19:23 on Jul 7, 2016 |
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Jul 7, 2016 19:18
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That Shadowrun bit reminds me: I think it was in Dragonfall that I found an administration console. I scoured the location pretty thoroughly up to that point, so I was surprised when I realised I didn't find any hint of an admin password in the level. So just on a whim I walk up to the computer and try:quote:Login: admin Even in the cyberpunk bullshit future, people are still too lazy to change the default password.
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Aug 3, 2016 22:59
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I'm playing my first Super Robot Wars game, SRW J for GBA, and it's just full of tiny mechanical things that combine to make a great experience. Coming from Fire Emblem, the best single thing was seeing that every single enemy attack triggers a Counter/Defend/Evade choice, with Defend halving damage and Evade halving enemy hit rate, so the player still has important decisions to make in the enemy phase instead of just watching themselves getting dunked on. Animated battle sequences feature music from the relevant anime. It continues to play on the map screen until something else overrides it. Theme music for particular mecha can also be changed in the menu. Speaking of customization, you can also change the names of attacks for your self-insert protagonist's mecha to any dorky names you can think of! Spirits (active pilot skills) can completely turn the tide of battle if you use them well. A weaker mecha can still be invaluable to the team if it has multiple pilots, all with their spirit point pool. Speaking of pilots, they have different personalities that determine how they gain and lose morale. Combo attacks strike multiple units in a row, but only the first one can counter, so you can effectively simulate bursting out of an enemy into the boss for a surprise attack. Many bosses have a "Retreat HP" stat. If they go below this threshold, they escape the battle, leaving no rewards. If you manage to bring them down to 0 anyway, you get the items, money and experience normally, so the mechanics themselves encourage ending bosses with huge finishers. After a while, every battle becomes a balancing act of multiple weird gimmicks, including but not limited to super modes, combining mecha, trading attachments, energy shields etc. The game itself, instead of a tutorial, provides an optional series of puzzles that force you to take advantage of obscure mechanics. All this on a goddamn Gameboy Advance. I'm having a blast with this game and supposedly it's not even the best the series has to offer.
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Sep 6, 2016 12:22
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Captain Lavender posted:Skies of Arcadia has aged so badly that it's just the few 'little things' that make it enjoyable. Xenoblade Chronicles has the music turn tense when somebody in your party is knocked unconscious. It also has different, awesomer music for when a named monster appears and starts bashing your face in. Until you're overleveled for the area, hearing it suddenly in combat with multiple enemies is a good indicator that you should run away, so it feels all the better when you can finally last long enough to hear the full version. It also has day and night versions for a lot of areas' music. There's a lot of neat touches in the game. More relevantly, Fire Emblems also usually have triumphant music start to play when the boss is the only remaining enemy on the map.
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Jul 2, 2017 17:19
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Gann Jerrod posted:Been playing Shin Megami Tensei IV and there are some little touches I find neat. First is that when you kill a demon with magic or a special attack, there are different effects, like the enemy getting shot full of holes with a gun attack, or blown away with a tornado with a wind attack. These are incredible. In the sequel/alternate reality, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, you play a different character with a different cultural background and all the relic descriptions change. It's also a silent protagonist, so these are basically the only insight you get into his character. It manages to work real well.
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Oct 15, 2017 10:25
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JOHNSON COCKSLAP posted:No, contextual actions are not making a game easier. They're just meaning you don't have to press 3 buttons to open a door because X was already used to press a button two levels ago. Little controls thing: I remember being amazed when I first played Ocarina of Time and I could do a lot of different actions without memorizing half a keyboard like in some PC games. Seeing a new verb bound under A was also oddly satisfying. It was basically my introduction to gamepad-oriented control design, with less buttons to work around. Of course, OoT also has three hotkeys with juggling items between them, but that was usually enough to put together an effective set for a given area. I also grew to like the games that bind the entire keyboard, like Ultima IV or oldschool roguelikes, but for arcade and arcade-ish games, building an effective control scheme without overcomplicating it but still giving players meaningful choices is kind of an art.
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Oct 25, 2017 19:50
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I love when games with auto-save let you manual save anyway. Off the top of my head, Batman: Arkham Knight, Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey all have this option. I started to play games before autosaves were the norm and I still feel a bit anxious when I end the session without saving manually.  Batman gets additional props for telling you how many minutes ago your last autosave was.
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Oct 27, 2017 22:35
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RareAcumen posted:Man, someone needs to take anime plots and apply them to a bunch of ripped shirtless dudes drawn like Greek statues. From this thread, there's a ton of money to be made using anime but making sure that everyone looks like Mike Haggar at the least instead. Who better to draw like Greek statues than literal statues.
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Oct 28, 2017 07:46
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The random outfit stuff in Mario is super cool but makes me wish I'd never bought the clown clothes for completion.  It really helps deal with tougher challenges, though, because you are "rewarded" with a new outfit everytime you die.
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Nov 10, 2017 07:46
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Leavemywife posted:Isn't Zan Force? Or are Force and Wind the same? I can never remember. Zan is Force, Garu is Wind. I don't think both have ever been in the same game, so they're pretty much interchangeable. Garu seems to mostly stick with Persona, but it was also in Strange Journey. My favourite little thing in SMT spell names is the spell Luster Candy, which casts one level of all three buffs: Rakukaja (defense), Sukukaja (evasion/hit rate) and Tarukaja (attack) on your entire party. Why is it called "Luster Candy"? That's the best equivalent they could find for the original Ra-Su-Ta Candy, from the stat names. 
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Jan 2, 2018 18:03
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Mages of Mystralia is a real good action game about wizards. Though the main conceit of the game is customizing spells, it's less like Magicka and more like Zelda. You start out with four categories of spells (melee, ranged, area, buff) and as you wander through the world and complete combat and puzzle challenges, you unlock more components to be freely added to them. The most basic one is adding the Move component to a mine spell to make it a fireball, but couple of hours later you get to hurling insane bouncing triple thunderbolts that cast more thunderbolts on impact. There is a mana bar, so it's not as unbalanced as it might seem, and weaker spells can still be useful later on. Anyway, the specific little thing I wanted to post about is that after a couple dungeons, when I unlocked switching any spell to ice-element, the most basic buff spell that has saved me many times, Shield, has been redefined as a mirror shield and can help with puzzles now.
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Jan 8, 2018 20:16
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BioEnchanted posted:I always like the rare times that it's your character telling an NPC how to do stuff. For me, the character defining moment for Cloud in Final Fantasy VII was him schooling every NPC in the traditional FF tutorial house, because he's an experienced mercenary at this point and already knows all the mechanics. Also doubles as a little thing.
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Apr 2, 2018 09:37
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My favourite "small thing" about Planescape: Torment is exactly that you can avoid every fight in the game except like three. I usually get annoyed at the Infinity Engine games being way too close to the tabletop games and ending up random and terribly balanced for it, so I end up quickloading constantly in early game and being too tired of it to actually reach the mid-game. Planescape goes around that by just not having you fight. And your companions are badass enough to handle most threats once you talk them through their personal problems with your mammoth INT to make them stronger. You can also become a wizard to make use of that INT in combat! An actual small thing: your first companion is a floating skull, classed as a warrior. He's the best tank you could hope for, because he can swear at your enemies to attract their attention and he's really hard to actually hit because he's a floating skull!
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Apr 13, 2018 06:48
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Oh, I've worn that briefly because I thought it looked awful and I never noticed! That's amazing, please continue liveblogging
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Jul 29, 2018 15:30
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I'm playing Cosmic Star Heroine which just came out on Switch (it's been out for a while on Steam) and I'm blown away by how well they thought the combat mechanics through. It feels like turn-based Chrono Trigger, but: - most of your skills are only usable once until you spend a turn to defend and recharge. Every character is quite diverse between damage, healing and support, but you need to think about which attacks and heals to use when. - your characters hit Hyper Mode every couple of turns. The UI makes it very easy to tell when it will happen, and it's important, because it causes your action for the turn to have a double effect. Timing damage buffs so they line up for your Big Turn when you use a finisher feels great. - status effects are not random. Enemies and allies have a set amount of ailment resistance that works like hit points, and usually you can get through it in one of two infliction attempts. Some enemies are immune to statuses (mostly stuff like robots being immune to poison) but it's always pretty clear. It also works with the Hyper Mode mechanic, because a hyperboosted ailment will almost certainly hit or at least chew through the bulk of the resistance so the next attack will finish the job. The game's not that hard, but it does reward reading all your attack tooltips and thinking how they fit into your general strategy. It's tone is also refreshingly bubbly and fun. It's just a bunch of tiny things that add up.
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Aug 16, 2018 00:26
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It's made worse because the monster's name is "Riverson" instead of "Leviathan". One of the worse translation phoneme gaffes I've ever seen (next to Y Burns). My favourite is still Karl Boss.
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Aug 19, 2018 17:08
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Leavemywife posted:At least in TWEWY, you could manually change the drop rates. Granted, it was at the cost of your level going down in proportion, but I always thought that was a cool way to do it. It was probably the best way to do random drops I've ever seen. It should be added that your level only affected your HP, so you could easily deal with the lowered level by stepping up your dodging game and/or using more defense-oriented builds. I wish more games with arcade combat copied that, the only one I know is KH Re:Coded. While we're at improving the random drop system, shout out to Dark Souls, where if you kill off all of a non-respawning enemy type, the last one will always drop their thing if you didn't get it by then.
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Sep 25, 2018 07:36
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That reminds me of two of my favourite things in Shadowrun: Hong Kong. The first kind of emerges naturally from the cyberpunk magical setting. In Shadowrun, magic is real, which includes feng shui. One of the missions in Hong Kong involves trashing a rival corporation's office and moving their desks to ruin their business by proxy. Sadly it's not very subtle, you wreck their paintings and literally fight guardian spirits, but the implication is there that you can decide the fate of a company by hanging enough pictures in the wrong places. The other one I don't actually remember if it was in Dragonfall or Hong Kong. Context: the games are usually good with giving you multiple approaches to a problem if you just explore, whether it's hacking, combat, conversation, finding a password on a note somewhere, etc. When in a hotel (?), I decided to walk around and see what my options are before doing anything, so I ended up opening all the doors and breaking into all the computers. Eventually I found the main server. It was slightly out of the way, but I still wanted to see what was inside out of curiosity. I'd scoured the place pretty thoroughly, but didn't find any passwords for it and there wasn't a hacking prompt. So I tried: login: admin password: admin Access granted.
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Nov 5, 2018 23:13
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Yeah! The slow, meandering search for the truth was real good. For content, I've been replaying FFXII and it's one of those games where non-human enemies don't drop cash, but thematically appropriate loot. The good little thing is that every bit of loot has its own flavour text about how it's usually used in the world. I love learning that trade in bone fragments is forbidden in some countries for fear of necromancy, or that this lightning-elemental rock can be used as an airship power source.
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Apr 12, 2020 07:18
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Cleretic posted:Honestly, if they make another Warriors game with a Nintendo property, I want them to do the one Koei-Tecmo apparently dreams of. Dynasty Warios. 
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Apr 18, 2020 17:36
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Morpheus posted:Heaven's Vault In a similar vein, check out Suveh Nux, a really short text adventure based on recognizing patterns in magic words and interacting with the very limited environment. It might be non-gamey enough to recommend! To stay on topic, my favourite little things in this tiny game are all the minor interactions. You have a clear goal (get out of the vault you're locked in) and you get tools to achieve it, but nothing stops you from messing with everything else in the room using whatever other combinations of words you can think of. There's even easter eggs for some things you can do! It's playable here, with or without download. https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xkai23ry99qdxce3
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May 22, 2020 21:43
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Lechtansi posted:This is actually a fun exercise - what games mixed up genres in a novel way? Like, turning metroid prime and the witness taking side scrolling exploration and puzzlers into first person perspective. The old DOS Dune adventure game became a strategy once you talked to enough Fremen that you actually had an army. And of course, Battlezone was a RTS where you were a unit on the battlefield in FPP.
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Jun 7, 2020 06:42
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NoEyedSquareGuy posted:Not really a puzzle, but apparently you're supposed to get to the Goron village by capturing one of the lizards on the outskirts and using it to make a heat resistance potion so the environment doesn't damage you. I didn't know that was a thing, so I got there by traveling to the warp point right above a bunch of durian trees, using them to completely fill my inventory with full health restores, then running the entire way to the village while on fire healing up every time I was just about to die.  if you go to the stable nearest the volcano, one of the women hanging around there will sell you three bottles of the heat resist potion for a decent price, no hassle involved. That's easily enough to get to Goron City. But I love that this worked.
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Jul 5, 2020 15:00
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Leavemywife posted:I played through Tales of Berseria a couple of years ago, loved it, and loved the fashion system, which let you add things like hats, charms, jewelry, change costumes and hairstyles. I decided to give it another play, and just found out for some of these things, you can change their color, as well as their position along the X, Y, and Z axis, including their size. I've only got the cowboy hat so far, but you can make it dumbass long like a Xenomorph skull on your characters head. Xillia did the same thing. I still haven't played a lot of it but as soon as I got the dolphin plushie I clipped it right through the protagonist's face. He's a dolphin now.
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Jul 10, 2020 13:17
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There's no leadership limit in HoMM that I've played, but you also won't get playable ghosts normally. The murderstock of choice is skeletons, because you get more from every fight with the necromancy skill. Most of those mechanics, the weird HP and its interactions with regen and the undead are in HoMM. The PS game looks like the clunkiest iteration of everything around it ever, though.
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Nov 1, 2020 14:41
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It happened to Tales of Eternia and the few first Mana games, so I wouldn't even be surprised. Some big brain publishing moves in the 90s.
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Feb 28, 2021 12:48
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