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pentyne
Nov 7, 2012
Shenmue II

So, beat the game, took maybe 15 hours? It was 32 hours for both Shenmue I and II combined, and it really felt like I was blowing through Shenmue 2 at a much faster pace. It had a lot of moments that were clearly designed to pad for time I avoided by using a walk-through. First, about the games in general

The combat system: The whole Virtua Fighter style is not a very good combat system. Typically if you have a 2d-esque fighting game that allows you to dodge in 3 dimensions, the camera would need to be set up so that it doesn't mess with the directional inputs that much. Instead, it's a game where you constantly break the direction you're facing, the camera will constantly move on its own, and you can't target anyone specifically so group battles are annoying as hell.

The story: It desperately wants to be a martial arts hero's journey but never commits to it, so everything martial arts specific feels almost tacked on and undeveloped. The whole mirror plot gets 1 mention in the entirely of Shenmue 2 prior to the ending of Disc 3.


The characters: The named NPCs have no impact or emotional weight aside from a few (lol Nozomi) so all the scenes showing Ryo have deep emotional feelings about them land flat.


Now, for Shenmue II in particular, it doesn't deserve the attention I gave to the first game, because it's a worse version all around. Maybe I somehow missed all of them, but S1 had 70-80 optional scenes you'd encounter not related to the plot, while S2 has maybe 3? There's literally no effort for anything that isn't main plot guided story.

There's a clear lack of time/resources/competent management in S2, because in S1 it seemed like every character was given the same level of detail as Ryo, now in S2 you'll commonly see NPCs that have a single solid texture for hands, like some lego man poo poo. Same for some terrible lip movement, even some times where they didn't even animate the mouths while the camera is focused on someone's face. All that time/resources was almost certainly do to being wasted on some grand vision they could never implement. Hong Kong is huge, one map area of 6 is the size of the entire Shenmue 1 game, and then you go to another city, Kowloon, that is similar. There's tons of shops and NPCs roaming and nothing to do anywhere until the plot sends you in that direction. It's a game with almost no depth to it.

The game plot wants to force you into engaging in the terrible optional side quests to make money, even though the only good idea would be to save-scum while gambling. The crate stacking is so terrible I don't understand why they just didn't keep the forklift game in. The other distractions are unnecessarily hard, like some of the fights or arm wrestling, probably just to gate off easy money.

For a game that seems in love with the idea of Ryo as a martial artist, it completely wastes any potential it has to engage. You show up in HK, a city containing many martial art experts, and introduces the idea which Ryo seeing a old man practicing Tai Chi. You end up sparring with him as practice, and later can learn a tai chi move. You get the option to change which moves you use for certain combo attacks, like forward+A can either be your standard karate move, or the new tai chi move, so you'd really think that Shenmue 2 is going to be learning a bunch of new styles and figuring out what moves you like.

It's not, and also there's no practice area anywhere to level up your moves, so it doesn't really matter because you need to take whatever you have as the strongest because everything is combat. The game also mentions the four Wude, core principals of being a martial artist. That also pretty much goes nowhere after being forced to learn about them. Everything about martial arts in the game is some quick, borderline unnecessary moment. You come across this guy in a cage fight, killing people, and have to fight him to rescue someone, and its a quick victory and then moving on like it never happened.


Disc 1-3 are basically one game, where you have to run around the cities constantly finding the next clue and the game aggressively wasting your time. One example is needing to find a tea house and use a secret signal to trigger the plot. There are 11 possible places to go, 1 is correct, 3 will give you a cut-scene with advice, and the other 7 you just waste half a day waiting.

Oh, and the game loving loves its QTEs. And not like a 6-7 step QTE from Shenmue 1, but upwards of 20-25 in sequence where failure means you start all over. It also decided on some Simon Says QTE that just sucks.

A lot of my rage was tempered by Disc 4 being slightly more then an interactive movie, when you meet the brown haired Chinese girl(Shenhua) that Ryo has been dreaming of since early in Shenmue 1. This is not an exaggeration, but Ryo has more dialogue and interaction with Shenhua then possibly every single named NPC in both games combined. It's 2 hours of walking in the forest, chatting with her and learning about her while sharing details of Ryo's life. It's the absolute best the game got at developing the story and while I assume it was mostly down to "ran out of cash" it works so much better then the general design of the rest of the game it seems like had Yu Suzuki been told to cut his budget in half he would've made a far better game.

Overall, it's got a lot of problems and none of the charm Shenmue 1 has, but it's not a terrible game, just kind of a boring one. It makes a great podcast play-through because very rarely is anything of importance going to go on that you need to focus and listen to. I think the game is more a consequence of unchecked ambition, just no one willing to trim the fat and focus on a core experience that people would enjoy.

Time to see what 15+ years of time between games amounted to

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Zathril
Nov 12, 2011
I got a key from Fanaticals spin to win thing, says it's for Autonaughts, but I assume it means Autonauts, which I already have.

If anyone is interested, the key is xx0J3-05M0F-ENHMP, where x is the last letter of the alphabet.

Dehry
Aug 21, 2009

Grimey Drawer


It's happened.

Hollandia
Jul 27, 2007

rattus rattus


Grimey Drawer

pentyne posted:

Time to see what 15+ years of time between games amounted to
Check your PM's.

Det_no
Oct 24, 2003
Some of these leaked documents from the Epic case are wild. Especially the ones delineating every single step of Epic's plan to breach contracts.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

Hollandia posted:

Check your PM's.

Sorry, forgot to mention it, but yeah this person gave me a spare Shenmue 3 key so I decided to go full steam ahead on the trilogy.

lol the game is already steller. The Four Wude, the super important martial arts concepts, don't even get a narration explaining them in the recap movie. It's just the symbol & name shown above a brief 2 second scene from Shenmue 2 where you learned them.

The weirdo looking albino(?) martial artist gets 3x as much attention, so I'm gonna have to assume he's a major part of Shenmue 3.

Mescal
Jul 23, 2005

Take one

Into the breach: fun mechs vs aliens puzzles on a small grid. Quite good!
https://www.humblebundle.com/gift?key=mUdspbGe8rmUHpxF

Wargroove: basically anime wargames chess on a bigger grid. Quite fun and polished, good if you like chess! https://www.humblebundle.com/gift?key=b4qVRAWxExxChyaK

Undertale: I didn't like this one because I felt like it was fixing to be emotionally manipulative 0IM94-QBDET-J0TFH

Post if you redeem one so people don't waste their clicks

Im_Special
Jan 2, 2011

Look At This!!! WOW!
It's F*cking Nothing.

Det_no posted:

Some of these leaked documents from the Epic case are wild. Especially the ones delineating every single step of Epic's plan to breach contracts.
Ngl, it's pretty rude not to include the Steam Thread: Romance of the 3 Storefronts thread under the Communication Landscapes part. :colbert:

^^ EDIT:

Mescal posted:

Take one
Heck yeah! I nabbed Into the breach a game I've been dying to play for like ever, so huge thanks to you for this treat. Oh and also for using a humble link which probably slowed down the keybots a tad so my aging reflexes could nab in time.

Im_Special fucked around with this message at 01:45 on May 13, 2021

Belan
May 7, 2007

Mescal posted:

Wargroove: basically anime wargames chess on a bigger grid. Quite fun and polished, good if you like chess! https://www.humblebundle.com/gift?key=b4qVRAWxExxChyaK

Thanks!

Mescal
Jul 23, 2005

Im_Special posted:



Heck yeah! I nabbed Into the breach a game I've been dying to play for like ever, so huge thanks to you for this treat. Oh and also for using a humble link which probably slowed down the keybots a tad so my aging reflexes could nab in time.

Go for 'buildings immune' upgrade with the electric team, that's fun.



Belan posted:

Thanks!

Hit me up if you want to play co-op on wargroove.

I got this bundle ( https://www.humblebundle.com/humble-heal-covid-19-bundle )mostly for Baba... which one should I play after that? I'm thinking bioshock, saints row, crusader kings, just because I've heard of 'em. Any thoughts?

Mescal fucked around with this message at 05:07 on May 13, 2021

ultrafilter
Aug 23, 2007

It's okay if you have any questions.


I'm not all that wild about the new Helltaker content. It's more of the same with the difficulty turned up to 11. If that's your thing you're gonna love this, but it wasn't for me.

Im_Special
Jan 2, 2011

Look At This!!! WOW!
It's F*cking Nothing.

Mescal posted:

Go for 'buildings immune' upgrade with the electric team, that's fun.
I'll keep that in mind. I'm already checking out the wiki for it and I have literally no idea what I'm looking at! But yeah, I can really tell this is a game made by the FTL guys, which I love and something I have over 75 hours in (which for me is a ton), and still consider it one of the all time greats, so if Into the Breach if only just half as good as FTL, I'm still going to dig it.

Hollandia
Jul 27, 2007

rattus rattus


Grimey Drawer

pentyne posted:

Sorry, forgot to mention it, but yeah this person gave me a spare Shenmue 3 key so I decided to go full steam ahead on the trilogy.
All good, just wanted to make sure you got the key and didn't buy it. Looking forward to reading the recap!

nordichammer
Oct 11, 2013
Pentyne that was a great read

Ghostlight
Sep 25, 2009

maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me



please tell me the hyperlink for "why does epic need more money" goes to one of their other documents showing how much money they're spending on exclusivity for their storefront.

pentyne
Nov 7, 2012

nordichammer posted:

Pentyne that was a great read

I felt the need to put it to words but literally everything negative people have posted about Shenmue is not only exactly true, but you might get genuinely angry over how badly they hosed it up. You can literally see where in the game they just set fire to millions of dollars in order to move 1 inch closer to the "vision" of what Shenmue would be, and still didn't even get 1/3 of the way there.

Shenmue 2 even ends with you being able to save a completed file, like a Shenmue 3 was a given. The game exists as a testament to the arrogance of man.

OgNar
Oct 26, 2002

They tapdance not, neither do they fart
Just saw that Homefront, the game that has Timesplitters 2 embedded in it, was $4 on Fanatical.

And then I saw that they were somehow 'sold out'.

Wiggly Wayne DDS
Sep 11, 2010



Det_no posted:

Some of these leaked documents from the Epic case are wild. Especially the ones delineating every single step of Epic's plan to breach contracts.
it's from the court case and intended for publication. there's been one relevant accidental upload so far - dx-3399. calling it a leak is disingenuous

Impermanent
Apr 1, 2010
Leaked by the United States Court system!!

Broken Cog
Dec 29, 2009

We're all friends here

ultrafilter posted:

I'm not all that wild about the new Helltaker content. It's more of the same with the difficulty turned up to 11. If that's your thing you're gonna love this, but it wasn't for me.
At least it's very short, I think I got through it in less than 30 minutes.

That last boss has got so much poo poo going on at the same time, though it also has some fairly generous checkpoints.

Kaiju Cage Match
Nov 5, 2012




I don't know anything about the Yakuza games, but I assume it's something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K90yf6y4bDE

Artelier
Jan 23, 2015


Kaiju Cage Match posted:

I don't know anything about the Yakuza games, but I assume it's something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K90yf6y4bDE

Spot on, 100% faithful recreation

Kanfy
Jan 9, 2012

Just gotta keep walking down that road.
It's basically like this













Plus a lot of karaoke.

Kanfy fucked around with this message at 13:00 on May 13, 2021

Good Soldier Svejk
Jul 5, 2010

Also like this

Edmond Dantes
Sep 12, 2007

Reactor: Online
Sensors: Online
Weapons: Online

ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL
Also an important message about kinkshaming:

Saoshyant
Oct 26, 2010

:hmmorks: :orks:




You can't just pick a bad pizza and hope for the best

FishMcCool
Apr 9, 2021

lolcats are still funny
Fallen Rib
Also, intense stealth sections:

Karma Tornado
Dec 21, 2007

The worst kind of tornado.

OgNar posted:

Just saw that Homefront, the game that has Timesplitters 2 embedded in it, was $4 on Fanatical.

And then I saw that they were somehow 'sold out'.

it's been four dollars there since like the week that Timesplitters news came out. they probably sold out of their allotment of keys ages ago now but had also been sitting on that allotment of keys for like four years prior

Saoshyant
Oct 26, 2010

:hmmorks: :orks:



OgNar
Oct 26, 2002

They tapdance not, neither do they fart

Karma Tornado posted:

it's been four dollars there since like the week that Timesplitters news came out. they probably sold out of their allotment of keys ages ago now but had also been sitting on that allotment of keys for like four years prior

Weird, i've been randomly checking on it every few days since then and this is the first ive seen of it.
Guess the price just wasnt being posted to Itad?

Kennel
May 1, 2008

BAWWW-UNH!

Mescal posted:

I got this bundle ( https://www.humblebundle.com/humble-heal-covid-19-bundle )mostly for Baba... which one should I play after that? I'm thinking bioshock, saints row, crusader kings, just because I've heard of 'em. Any thoughts?

It's Crusader Kings 1, so there is no need to touch it. CK2 is much more polished and the base game is free. I have no idea, why they would include that in a pack like this.

Out of the ones I've played Bioshock, Euro Truck, Undertale, Hyper Light Drifter, Witness, This War of Mine, Saints Row 3, Titan Quest and SUPERHOT are worth checking out, even though I didn't enjoy some of them personally (bold ones are my favorites).

Portal Knights is pretty weak Minecraft-copycat. Teleglitch is was too difficult for me and I didn't like the simplistic art style. I lost interest in Brutal Legend after they introduced battle mechanics.

Kennel fucked around with this message at 15:31 on May 13, 2021

RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester


lol

nordichammer
Oct 11, 2013
That Homefront game is like 70GB iirc so its likely not worth HD Timesplitters.

Darkrenown
Jul 18, 2012
please give me anything to talk about besides the fact that democrats are allowing millions of americans to be evicted from their homes

Kennel posted:

It's Crusader Kings 1, so there is no need to touch it. CK2 is much more polished and the base game is free. I have no idea, why they would include that in a pack like this.

Teleglitch and Dwarfs?! are both published by Paradox too IIRC - looks like someone asked if they wanted to be in a covid bundle and they generously handed over 3 ancient and worthless games.

Castor Poe
Jul 19, 2010

Jar Jar is the key to all of this.
Huntdown owns.

Ciaphas
Nov 20, 2005

> BEWARE, COWARD :ovr:



lol

Karma Tornado
Dec 21, 2007

The worst kind of tornado.

OgNar posted:

Weird, i've been randomly checking on it every few days since then and this is the first ive seen of it.
Guess the price just wasnt being posted to Itad?

my mistake, I got it from gamesplanet. all those sites look the same to me.

Bofast
Feb 21, 2011

Grimey Drawer

Darkrenown posted:

Teleglitch and Dwarfs?! are both published by Paradox too IIRC - looks like someone asked if they wanted to be in a covid bundle and they generously handed over 3 ancient and worthless games.

At least Dwarfs?! is good for an hour or two.

Darkrenown
Jul 18, 2012
please give me anything to talk about besides the fact that democrats are allowing millions of americans to be evicted from their homes
I've heard Teleglitch is OK too, and CK1 might at least be interesting to look at - I meant more "worthless" from a sales perspective than from a "worth trying out" one.

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Bofast
Feb 21, 2011

Grimey Drawer

Darkrenown posted:

I've heard Teleglitch is OK too, and CK1 might at least be interesting to look at - I meant more "worthless" from a sales perspective than from a "worth trying out" one.

Oh, yeah, agreed on that one.

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