Lurker > Epyo

Emerald Weapon (Final Fantasy VII)
Mike Tyson (Punch-Out)
Death (Castlevania 1)
Yellow Devil (Mega Man)

Although honestly I think Ruby is harder than Emerald... BUT maybe Emerald is more memorable due to it sneaking up on you, and due to the timer, and therefore more deserving of a rushmore seat.

Yeah the cactuar doors are definitely the hardest thing about chocobo racing. I forgive them because they're a hilarious concept.

The chocobo racing was one of my favorite parts of the game, I really enjoyed it. I felt like they nailed the difficulty of the last few races--challenging but doable, and not too random like mario kart single player.

Guys I just checked a vending machine again on my postgame file, there's no Revival materia in the vending machines. And there's none in my bags.

...

And then I went to the vending machine outside the dyne fight, and it DOES HAVE IT. It's the only vending machine that seems to have it?!?!?

vending machines????? omg I scrolled through every vending machine, can't believe I never noticed Revival... the heck is wrong with me.

I actually thought it was a really interesting design choice to not give us Revive at all, and to barely have any Magnify (I only found 2). Makes you adapt in different ways, then maybe they bring them back for part 3 and you're all like "wow I missed these"...

I have a very defensive strategy in this game, so I hardly ever had a character faint anyways. Used maybe 10 phoenix downs all game long...

Revival materia is in this game?? Wow I never found a single one, and I thought I did basically everything on my normal playthrough, besides endgame stuff. Although I did notice I had Revival Materia Earrings in my bag near the end, don't even remember getting those.

I think you were supposed to have all characters fully decked out in materia all game long, right?

As soon as I started Rebirth I was like "oh yeah, Remake's final dungeon wanted me to have everyone fully equipped, so I'ma do that for the entire game this time, so it's not a rude awakening later" and it definitely made the game more fun IMO.

Plus even characters not currently in the party, gain AP on their equipped materia right? So that's another reason to have everyone fully decked out at all times. (COULD be wrong about this.)

v_charon posted...

I mean, I don't think explaining why I like it is really going to influence your opinion on it if you don't. I've just never seen so many people call the movie "bad" like this, even Miyazaki himself has said this was his favorite creation in the past. I always figured most everyone had it at the very least in the upper echelon.

I'm very swayable! My opinion of Spirited Away, for example, did drastically go up, after I read a long article that interpreted the movie as a pro-marxism anti-capitalism thing. That whole movie pretty much did go completely over my head. So it seems likely to me that I'm missing a lot about Howl's, because my media comprehension skills are hilariously bad (which is probably part of why I like Totoro, the dumbest movie ever, lol).

what's good about howl movie tho? i think maybe it went over my head each time i watched it. i was just like "what is this. that flame is cute i guess."

Jeez, the opinions are all over the map here!

Here's my ranking, all ghiblis 'cuz I'm too lazy to learn which ones are directed by who:

---awesome---
1. Totoro
2. Princess Mononoke
3. Cat Returns
---great---
4. Kiki's Delivery Service
5. Ponyo
6. Whisper of the Heart
7. Princess Kaguya
8. Porco Rosso
---good---
9. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
10. Spirited Away
---meh---
11. Howl's Moving Castle
12. Castle in the Sky
13. Pom Poko
---bad---
14. Secret World of Arrietty
15. The Wind Rises
---terrible---
16. From Up on Poppy Hill
17. Tales from Earthsea

I hated The Wind Rises so much (and anything released after Ponyo?) that I don't think I'll bother to see any future Ghibli movie. Mildly curious about Heron, but this thread is mostly confirming for me that I would hate it.

It's just a very different game than Remake, try to reset your expectations, I'd say!

Even in the OG, not much is happening at this point in the game in terms of "main plot". Focus more on the character interactions and the gameplay.

I bought a PS5 last week solely for this game. I'm about 14 hours in and satisfied with that decision.

I'm very happy with how it looks on PS5. I thought the first game looked very bad on PS4, unbearable 30fps framerate AND had some ugly spots. But the Performance mode here looks great to me, and the 60fps never drops. I don't think I'll even feel the need to re-play it on PC.

That being said, I'm also someone who really enjoys playing a game WHILE I'm reading about it on forums AND hearing about it on podcasts, so getting a game ON release, is pretty crucial for me. If it wasn't, then I absolutely could have waited, and continued playing Balatro every night instead, which is probably my true game of the year.

Just cleared the third difficulty ("stake") with the Yellow Deck (start with +$10), which is my favorite of the basic decks for some reason. It looked useless at first, but I can just more reliably get into that >$25 range quickly, getting the full $5 Interest earlier, and the whole money curve for the rest of the game is better.

-----

I might see a bit of a "flaw" in the game. You really want to pick ONE hand type per run and keep upgrading it (with planet cards). It doesn't make a lot of sense to upgrade them all, that's just spreading your resources thin. To defeat a blind, you need ONE SICK HAND with all the multipliers you can muster. You can't play 5 different mediocre hands and win, the math won't scale upwards quickly enough.

Which means the poker part of the game isn't that important--when you look at your dealt cards, you're not considering what hands you can aim for. Instead, you're discarding to get that one hand type you've strategized around. (Or when you're in a Boss Blind, you're probably simply discarding the debuffed garbage, to get some usable cards.)

Which is still fun! But it makes each run more like mathematical test, and not as much of a hand management (poker) game. You start to play each Blind on auto-pilot pretty quickly. Which is fine too I suppose, the strategies and synergies are the real fun.

But the real flaw is, from my perspective, you want to center your run around either "Flush" or "One Pair". They're the most reliable hand types you can invest in safely, and reproduce every Blind. Anything else is just too risky.

Sure enough, yeah this game got a lot easier now that I understand the X1.5 stuff. Now I'm winning like half the time, or so.

I'm really enjoying the different settings to start the game! The different decks and the little difficulty levels are very cool.

This might be the best game ever made.

changmas posted...

midas mask turns all face cards into gold cards, vampire instantly turns them back into regular cards and gains x0.2 mult

Ahhh nice, I just saw the vampire clown tonight and I was like "oof that sounds hard to use." cool combo. I really appreciate that being able to reorder things manually, takes out a lot of the guesswork.

In general, everything's pretty obvious how it will interact in this game, which is insanely impressive.

I can't think of any game with better tooltips.

I was watching jon blow stream this and realized I misinterpreted "X1.5 mult" and "X2" mult. I thought that was just another way to say "+2 mult". this game's gonna be easy now.

also I feel like this is an "engine builder" not a "deckbuilder". deckbuilder means something more specific to me.

i thought i was complete "over" roguelikes, but yeah this one rules.

both my runs have gotten to around 7/8 ante and fizzled out, think I need to take some bigger risks to swap out some jokers around that point.

also both runs depended on that red opaque joker card, where you simply keep buying packs and skipping them.

redrocket posted...

This is spinning off of Race for the Galaxy?

yeah! this is the expansion TO a spin off OF rftg yeah

I'm co-designer of this board game expansion, released last year, for a game that was a spin-off of definitely one of the best board games of all time! gimme some fame creditz

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/375115/jump-drive-terminal-velocity

Ooh I'm in the middle of a re-watch over the past couple months! First time watching it in like 10 years. I'm only halfway through season 13 though.

I'm going to pick the episodes I think about most often in day-to-day life, that are also really good episodes.

Make Love, Not Warcraft: It's just so cool. I still play WoW and we still reference this of course.
Good Times With Weapons: The switching back and forth between Anime mode is genius and amazingly well done, especially the music.
AWESOM-O: Butters/Cartman is my fav part of the series and this is my fav one. Great song!!
The Simpsons Already Did It: Good use of professor chaos, the sea monkey stuff is wild, inspiring message about creativity.

Really wanted to get the Mormon episode in too, but couldn't fit it in.

Gonna talk down some other episodes:

"Trapped In The Closet" the scientology stuff is good and interesting, but the actual Closet gag is pretty thin.

"Scott Tenorman Must Die" isn't as fun when you already know what happens, IMO. Still great though.

"The Return of the Fellowship..." fell flat for me the first time, when I didn't know LOTR much. (Now I love it though!)

"The Losing Edge" I freaking love this episode and think about it often, but it is mostly the same two jokes for 22 minutes: the boys wanna lose baseballl, and Randy loves to fight the other parents.