Lurker > Xiahou Shake

Hell yeah, Nier in the top 10. Part of me is hoping that (beyond the choice to go with Brother Nier) they don't mess with the remaster too much narrative-wise just so there's an easier way to recommend the game to new players. It's getting harder and harder to ask people to go back to the PS3.

Of course another part of me is hoping they go full mindfuck and add in all sorts of crazy stuff from supplementary material so hmm

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Picked this up last night and it's a crazy solid collection! Seems beyond perfect for in-person hangouts, but I guess it'll be a while yet before folks are doing those lol

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I feel like the clarification statement for this is always "not this Monday, but next Monday." Even as late as Saturday I'd say it means nine days away.

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Yeah most of those complaints on the other hand are totally warranted. I often think of BotW as a great illustrator of the difference between "playing a game" and just "playing." It gives you so many amazing tools to just faff around but holy moly would I love more than the skeletal content it has on offer to apply those mechanics against.

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swordz9 posted...

No? Other than the 2 types of weapons good against Guardians it never really matters what you use. I used everything I found and other than the magic weapons none of them were different enough for me to care at least.

Spoken like someone who's never done the BotW axe spin-to-win

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

That said, I would be pretty upset about FFX being number 1 because I think that game is straight up bad and have never understood why people like it, particularly in the story and characters department (I don't like a single character in that cast). It's completely beyond me. Hell, it's literally the first JRPG I ever completed and was almost enough to turn me off of them entirely.

FFX has an extremely well-realized world just in terms of how rich you can feel (and see!) its culture is. The story itself isn't super amazing though IMO and I might even argue its single most critical beat was done better in Tales of Symphonia of all things, but I would imagine the majority feels quite differently.

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MGS3 is my favorite video game ever but I have to admit MGS2 was the right pick here. Going back to that story today and realizing it wasn't just smart but downright prophetic about how the world would look in a little over a decade is seriously incredible.

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SantaRPidgey posted...

I'm keeping track of the people who say the controls aren't very good and labeling you all under "people who apparently put very little effort forth"

like mario 64 has the tightest controls in video games.

For my part I was mostly talking about the act of actually playing it with an N64 controller, which IMO is an abomination. I haven't personally played SM64 on anything else but I'm willing to believe it's a thousand times better on several other options.

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I super glad you ended up enjoying it as much as you did! Yakuza is my favorite game series at this point and Y0 is the cream of the crop. If you like what you saw here there's an absolute ton more where that came from, but perhaps moreso than any other series I'd warn you to pace yourself - it's remarkably easy to get burned out considering every game takes place at least partially, if not exclusively, in Kamurocho. The awesome familiarity and feeling of coming home quickly becomes a double-edged sword if you're playing the games back to back.

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Episode 8 is good and I legit think the people who don't like it feel called out for having too much fun solving the mystery. As someone who cracked the case after episode 5 I enjoyed being made to reflect on my rather callous deductions/enthusiasm!

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Menji posted...

Speaking of, is anyone still holding MFA? It's above $3 now.

I got in on MFA at $1.20 and I'm lowkey freaking out watching it climb over the last little while. I'm still planning on holding since the only reason I got into the market in the first place was to give my savings for a home down payment a major booster shot over the next year and a half. MFA looks rock solid historically so I feel pretty comfortable continuing to hold. Any thoughts on that from the more experienced traders here?

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The overall design is still borderline miraculous and the mechanics are tight enough to make it kind of mindblowing that this was a first crack at 3D.

BUT the controls and camera are really, really rough compared to its contemporaries. If the rumors of a SM64 remaster turn out to be true I think we'll see just how badly that touch-up was needed.

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pyresword posted...

I did watch my friend play through most of Bioshock Infinite and that seemed pretty solid?

Infinite is really weird to compare to the first Bioshock. It has IMO a better story but far worse writing - better gameplay but significantly worse design.

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Before COVID and protests it was looking a bit too close for comfort. Now Biden's looking like a lock.

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Absolutely lost my shit at Nugget on my first playthrough so that string of posts made me smile

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2 is slightly better but Avengers at #1 and Endgame > Infinity War both hurt pretty bad

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The site in general has long, long outlived its usefulness and the game boards are legitimately horrid pits of toxicity.

B8 in particular is my favorite online community though, so here I remain.

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3DSRage posted...

Unless you are broke invest in a good one. You spend most of your day in it!

Definitely agree with this. I burned through several mediocre office chairs using the "try it in the store" method until I finally decided to throw the cash down for a refurbished Herman Miller and holy shit it's so amazing. By reputation I'm not going to need another chair for the next ~15 years too with this so honestly the money difference is probably less than you'd think.

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Aw, I actually find a decent chunk of MGR's codecs to be interesting. Of course I'm completely nutty for cyberpunk and its accompanying philosophies so a lot of the topics were naturally intriguing to hear discussed like they were. (Doktor and Wolf had most of the good ones)

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Wow I honestly didn't expect To the Moon to make the list at all, even though I had it (relatively low, granted) on my list. Good to see, it's a great story!

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Mac Arrowny posted...

I mean, it only had 4 voters...

True enough, that's a pretty small sampling! I'd be interested to see where the board at large stands on them.

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Yessssss Uta

Interesting to see the V3 support so strong with DR2 apparently nowhere close. Thought the board was a bit more divided on the series ranking than that.

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Bloodborne is legitimately the perfect Souls game IMO but whether that means anything to you depends on how much you enjoy that flavor of game. I enjoy it quite a bit so the game lands somewhere in the upper 9s for me and is one of my favorite games of all time. Honestly the only complaint I have about it is its dogshit performance which god willing will be addressed on the PS5.

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One of the best stretches in all of gaming right here.

ZeldaTPLink posted...

These were probably the most glorious 40 seconds of my gaming career until now.

And this is exactly how I felt after finishing it!

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These last few posts have me so interested/excited to check this series out. I've got a good few games lined up that I want to play first, but I think I'll finally give this series a crack over the summer!

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I don't know who the other folks are who voted Ghost Trick but you're both gentlemen and scholars.

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Raka_Putra posted...

I think I just might, eventually. Are the other games as content-packed as this one?

Some of them moreso, actually! Hard to believe considering how much stuff there is in it but 0 is very much the "quality over quantity" game.

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Woot woot, tag!

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SantaRPidgey posted...

hey uhh how does getting amiibos work

because I'm been literally mashing through dialogue for 22 straight minutes and can't got more than 3 different resposnses

Invite them over and do their stuff until they say they'd love to come back

Invite them over another day, repeat

Repeat again but this time they'll be willing to move in.

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Curfews are spreading throughout my county now - 2020 is really the gift that keeps on giving! But you know, in an awful way.

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Sigh

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They're nice to have as an indicator of things to do for 100%, but other than that I don't really care about them.

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How do all the Castlevania fans in here feel about Bloodstained? I'm right in the middle of my first run of it now and it's kind of incredible how well it scratches the itch. All the different builds you can make and instantly swap between are crazy fun, too!

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Castlevania's general aesthetic and music are among my favorite in video games period so that gives it a huge edge. It also has the benefit of two notably outstanding eras each with their own truly legendary titles - Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night being the best of their respective breeds, but games like Castlevania 1/3, Aria of Sorrow and Order of Ecclesia are all downright amazing as well.

All unique series appeal aside, the Metroid-style games feel like they do Metroid better than Metroid itself, so this isn't particularly close for me.

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I actually generally agree with all of your points!

Yes, I was pretty close to mentioning stuff like the recent appearance of "cinematic" and "performance" modes in games as a very good trend. I also agree that graphics creep is extremely overrated, as I personally care much more about performance... but as you said, devs have to do what they must to make money, and the market would clearly rather play a "CRAZY GRAFIKS" game at an unstable 30 fps than something that "looks like a PS2 game" at 60. Hence why AAA has ballooned to such an utterly unsustainable level and is now mirroring the super safe Hollywood checklist approach to green lighting.

The best possible thing is indeed the revitalization of A and AA developers, as you said, which is thankfully becoming more and more feasible as tools become more powerful and accessible.

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I'd personally like to see "generations" dissolved completely and replaced with much more frequent, incremental and optional upgrades for those who want more power. As things stand, consoles generally hold back developers by forcing them to develop to the lowest common denominator hardware-wise, even when market technology has long since left those units behind.

For reference, the PS4 was outdated technology on the day it came out, and yet developers were still tied to its specs for seven years. This was somewhat assuaged by the introduction of the PS4 Pro, but it didn't really affect things too much.

The PS5 and Series X seem to have caught up with modern technology, but now we have the rumored 30XX Nvidia cards coming out by the end of the year which, if rumors be believed, will already be packing the graphical powers you'd expect in a PS7. Consoles have already become so similar to PC architecturally, let's just dissolve the walls and either speed up hardware creep or, even better, allow for modular customization.

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I may be misinformed but I believe Scramble completely ignores Royal's existence and serves as a sequel to the vanilla game.

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Perhaps it'll clear things up if I say I don't already own Fata Morgana and don't want to spend money on something that's going to have a direct upgrade released in the near future (for likely a comparable price, at that.) I didn't expect the sentiment to seem so alien!

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iiicon posted...

this is a very funny post

I don't think it's too silly to want to wait for the newer, spiffier version of something that's (supposedly) right around the corner!

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

Bruh the newest release already has new high resolution art and CGs, but it's not like that's the drawing point....

I had heard the current PC version can only render at 800 x 600 which I don't even know if I'd be able to read on my monitor lol, is that not the case?

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I'm waiting on that updated 4K remaster of Fata Morgana that was announced a while ago and then just went utterly silent

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ZTD > VLR imho but I didn't put either of them on the list.

VLR feels better in the moment but all it really is in the end is a blank check of unresolved hype that ZTD was forced to attempt to deliver on. Certainly doesn't help that it has easily the worst cast in the series. (Interestingly enough it also includes some of the best individual characters in the series, but a third of the cast is made of up of truly bad characters which can't be said for either of the other games)

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That project he mentioned recently fell apart may be the horror thing he's been apparently gearing up for. If so, it seems he really can't win with that genre!

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CaptainOfCrush posted...

Things like the Heart-to-Hearts (dozens of scripted dialogue-option interactions between the party members) and the way they speak to and encourage each other during combat goes a long way in making them really feel like a cohesive team tackling a quest together.

Good banter is so, SO critical in elevating the characters in a modern RPG that it's wild to me so relatively few games really make use of it. Xenoblade is definitely among the best at it, right up there with Tales which is pretty much the mac daddy of banter.

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pyresword posted...

Also this apparently means somebody other than me probably voted for Mask of Deception/Truth which makes me very happy.

Great games

^5

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Putting that together was a really weird experience for me. Even as someone who often says story isn't necessarily a top priority in a game for me, it was kind of shocking to see how much of a disconnect there was between what I think are truly excellent stories and what my favorite games actually are! Of this top 10 I'd say only 2-3 of them would be in contention for my top 10 games overall.

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Ah, appreciate the tag, this does sound like fun! I'm absolutely horrible at doing these kinds of lists across an entire medium but I'll give it a shot.

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MajinZidane posted...

Should I go past X tho?

XIII-2 is excellent but XIII is both required reading and really bad

Actually just finished my first playthrough of XV over the weekend and I enjoyed it a lot... but objectively it's one of the most troubled games I've ever seen and is basically impossible to earnestly recommend. If the whole game was as good as its best parts it would potentially be my favorite Final Fantasy but holy cow so much went wrong with it.

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This topic reminded me of a game in development that's actually looking like a really great successor to Wave Race (with, you know, actual interaction with the water) but I can't remember what it was called and it's driving me crazy auuuuugh

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Holy crap lmao

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