Plants vs Zombies Battle for the Neighborville. You might think I’m kidding, but in terms of how it feels to play it’s my favorite shooter on the switch. The people who made that knew what the fuck they were doing.

Really good gyro implementation as well.

Just beat Catherine Full Body last night. There are a lot of things I like about the game, and some things I both like and dislike. It’s really more of a “this is the main character’s story and you’re mostly along for the ride” than it is a narrative experience where you choose every move the protagonist makes.

Because of that, I think how you feel about the story will be determined by your own stance on relationships and the morality of them, hedonism, marriage, and things like that. For me, I felt familiarity with my experience watching Breaking Bad in its painful spectation of characters who make questionable decisions and their creation of damning consequences.

Easy mode treated the puzzles well, just takes away the time pressure of the blocks falling away (save for the boss battles where you’re being chased). I ended up quite enjoying the puzzles! In the end, I don’t know if I’d recommend the game. If you’re interested in games doing something neat and novel with the topic of relationships then I think you’ll find value in it.

I did that with the first KoTOR a year ago! It was more difficult than using a saber for sure, you really get the impression they didn’t really think anyone would want to main blasters. How is it in the second one?

Just beat Slay the Princess twice. Wow, really lived up to the hype for me. Excellent writing and art. Excellent… Format and pacing for a visual novel with a lot of different choices. The themes it explores are incredibly interesting and varied.

I heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys a VN with a mysteriously intriguing story.

I think each new game in the Sword Art Online franchise is sort of independent of the mechanics of the previous. Hollow Realization had a lot of flaws, but I liked being able to class as whatever you liked, I played healer.

And I liked the mechanic where you could choose behavioral traits for your party members and if they performed abilities and actions that went with those traits you could praise them and they’d mold into the playstyle you wanted

Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization is also mechanically designed as a single player MMO

Depends on taste. I love mechanical depth and systems on systems and depending on how retro you’re talking most games older than, say early 2000s ish just don’t often have that

Disgaea 3 on the Vita had a loading screen with a prinny spinning like a ballerina. If you tilted the Vita the accelerometer would make him slide across the screen accordingly, like a spinning top

Mafia 3 comes to mind and a lot of the game’s story and themes are based around that fact

I’d say so, my order was 4, 5, 3, and I love it all the same

Personally, if platform doesn’t matter Id say 4 golden, 3 Reload, then 5 Royal. Purely from a mechanical and dungeon standpoint I think you will progress the most naturally from worst to best from there

4 Golden is now the oldest “modern” Persona game, I personally feel that 1 and 2 are just a little too old for you to get as much out of them as 3 forward, but that’s my take, if you’re very tolerant of older games you may wanna start older. Each entry has an independent story and characters, so I don’t think that order matters as much as the progression of quality of life and dungeon mechanics.

Making a new comment off my other reply because I have more niche recommendations: Carnage Hearts EXA, you program robots to fight each other, actually quite in depth.

Good RPGs: Valkyrie Profile Lenneth, Legend of Mana (originally PS1)

Phantasy Star Portable 2: pretty decent PSP version of the phantasy Star online game.

Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, kind of a weird “fighting” game, very unique mechanics, but really fun, lots of fan service, and tons of really really excellent music from across the final fantasy series

SoulCalibur Broken Destiny: solid entry in the series even on portable

And Castlevania Symphony of the Night (originally PS1)

Seconding. It’s rather easy since the levels have to be so small for the PSP, but goddamn it it’s a fun game.

Throwing in Monster Hunter Portable 3rd (has an English patch), Rengoku 2 (sort of action looter dungeon crawler where youre a robot and the loot replaces your arms and head and shit with weapons).

SOCOM tactical strike is one I rather enjoy, the Armored Core games as well.

This browser game/toy called Infinite Craft was doing that for me yesterday. It’s very neat, you just take different words and combine them to create new things, and then use those to make more things, but its secret is that it uses a low level AI so that if you craft a combination that’s never been crafted before it can accommodate that and attributes you as the first discoverer.

You start with the whole basic idea of combining elements like fire and water to make steam and such, but you can relatively quickly end up accidentally creating more complex things, and they dont even have to be objects, they can be named franchises or concepts like Star Wars or Creation.

Eventually I felt like a small kid ripping the limbs off action figures and seeing if the dinosaur head would fit on the Darth vader figure. I ended up first discovering some insane Eldritch shit like Barack Crabwich Vader-car, a part president, part crab, part sandwich, part sith lord cyborg, part car. Or Zombie Muppet Prince Kermie. Or the Jurassic Mecha-Deloreansaur.

It’s free and is a ridiculously absurd hoot, I’d recommend it on a PC browser since you get a big space to drag out certain concepts you wanna keep and reuse.

Sometimes, but casting has a lot of run up in DD, and sometimes the pawn might know to cast the right thing, but not have the forethought to cast it at the right time, or they’d give you a buff that was good in a current fight, then weak against the next monster, but because you can’t dismiss a buff you have, you’d just be stuck weak like that.

Little things like that compounded and because I could always just do all of it myself better, instead of incentivizing me to spend a lot of time retraining a pawn without very much feedback on where their tendencies were, it was far easier and immediately gratifying in so many ways to just become mage and do it myself.

I’m hoping DD 2 will have much more transparency in the pawn behaviors and personalities, and allow even more customization of what abilities they use and when, but I do still want it to retain some of that organic learning feel, I’m definitely not advocating for a Final Fantasy 12 programmed AI routine, as much as that’s cool in its own right, the organic feeling that your pawn is learning is part of the charm of DDDA.

I fuckin love Dragon’s Dogma. I love NPC companion systems in general in games, and DDDA was one of the only games I’ve seen where you can have a party of NPCs that autonomously interact with the world. They’ll engage in fights of their own volition, buff or heal you on their own, will open chests, destroy boxes, and loot on their own, and the ways you can modify their behavior by teaching them is very interesting.

Granted, they were never smart enough about buffing or healing, which often made me want to go Mage because I could do the job far better than them, but playing a game where I can play support and healer for an NPC party is another thing I love about DDDA that you don’t often see in other games.

Very stoked for the sequel.

Shit, Katana Zero took 6 years to develop, and it’s “just” pixel art, but it came out fantastic. You just never know either way.

Geometry Wars is fucking awesome. I still remember playing Project Gotham Racing 3 on my 360 as a teen and discovering the Geometry Wars arcade cabinet in your in-game house that just lets you play the whole game.

For me, the most recently, probably Dishonored. Id played it through before, and really enjoyed it, but never thought about replaying it until I saw it in my library again. So I replayed it, and goddamn it, that’s a great game still.

Always be careful going back to play older PC games. Often times there are fixes you have to apply because certain normalized features of modern PCs weren’t really considered when the game came out.

I think what you’re noticing about on foot sections in modern space games is because merging that sort of experience with a space sim is truly the space sim’s “final frontier”, so to speak. It’s the only part of an immersive gameplay experience that is yet to be executed as cleanly as the in-ship portion of a deep systems driven sci Fi space exploration game.

It’s why Starfield is the way it is, they tried to conquer that frontier as well, and had to make a lot of concessions to do so and didn’t have any prior experience in that sort of genre. I think it is safe to say that Starfield didn’t succeed well enough or deep enough to be the definitive shining example of a space sim with equally executed space and ground gameplay styles (partially because it’s not truly a space sim at all, more like an arcadey take on it )

One day a game will, and it’ll be awesome, but it’ll probably still be a while. Starfield showed that even if you throw lots of money and a professional team at it it’s not a sort of game you can easily make.

I think they’re talking about hours to price that you get from other people or websites. Your personal hours to price of course is worth quite a bit, but there’s no way to know it for sure until you’ve already paid, at which point its use as purchasing advice is already lost.

Dragon’s Crown on the Vita. Awesome Diablo meets Golden Axe sort of game. Really wish this one would make its way off Playstation so everyone could experience it.

I have a v2, so it’s a little past my willingness to mess with it, hopefully there’s no chance for bans on online play either

I was also thinking that. Long term battles simulated to the point of working on supply chain

There’s pieces of that in Everspace, I could totally see your game working and being pretty fun in a similar manner, less arcadey than Everspace, but still accessible

Damn dude, now I’m actually remembering base maintenance in online competitive games where you play a single character at all. Back in the day I used to enjoy that in Command & Conquer Renegade. Id hang back and repair people’s vehicles and the base when it came under attack.

Now I’m just imagining AC Black Flag, but Waluigi just replaces Edward whole cloth, just does all the voicelines and everything, everybody else just pretends he’s a normal guy.

There is a fix you can apply to fix the glitching ragdolls. If I recall correctly if you don’t fix it there will eventually be a physics related puzzle that won’t work right because the physics won’t be responding correctly and you’ll get stuck, but my memory could be wrong.

It’s pretty easy to fix and will increase your immersion

It wasn’t supposed to be, but it can be if you want. Is your name a Danganronpa V3 reference?

It’s more about the price of all the new games put together, and then the fact that a lot of review copies are sent in advance and for viewership purposes getting a review out quickly is important, but with some bigger studios not sending copies in advance more regularly now maybe we’ll see less incentive for reviewers to submit to their will.

I’m sure they want to keep always online for the same reason other games do, it’s guaranteed DRM.

For a squirrel you’re quite well-spoken and genteel. I applaud you, my good rodent.

Also to mention is the Switch’s true selling point, the portability. I can emulate whatever I want looking however I want on a PC, but not only is that more work, but I’m then chained to my PC, and I’m not some rich person who can responsibly budget to have a PC, Switch, and a Steam Deck on top of it.

Indeed. At this point it’s a “well, they got rid of the retroactive fees… this time, what about in five years?”